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HIS LIFE STORY 





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ILLUSTRATED FROM 
PHOTOGRAPHS 


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COPYRIGHT, 1925, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


CHARLES M. SHELDON 


—_A— 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


DEDICATED TO 
MY WIFE 


Who has encouraged me when I did 
my poorest, inspired me when I did 
my best, and helped me all along the 
way in between: this story would 
never have been written if she had 
not outlined it and then filled it in. 


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TO THE AUDIENCE 


This simple story has been written for three reasons. 

First, because I wanted to tell it. 

Second, because friends asked for it. 

Third, because the events and incidents seem to be 
related to certain history that is more than anything 
in my own, so that whatever might at first seem to 
be all personal, is, in reality, a part of so many 
others’ life story that I have been constrained to tell 
my own story for the sake of many other stories that 
have been in the process of making by the side of 
my own. 

No life is of any value apart from that of others. 
All biography is the picture of interrelated lives. 
That is what this story is. There has been no at- 
tempt on my part to write a literary treatise. If 
literature is what the dictionary says,—''the pro- 
ductions of a country or of a period, specially those 
that are notable for beauty or force of style,” the 
reader will not find it in this book. But may I hope 
that what is told will be of interest to the reader, 
and add to his happiness and his good will towards 
all mankind. 

CHARLES M. SHELDON. 


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CHARLES M. SHELDON 
HIS LIFE STORY 
Dates and Other Information 


Born, February 26, 1857, at Wellsville, New York. 

Father, Stewart Sheldon, son of a New York 
farmer, and Congregational Minister and Mis- 
sionary Pioneer. 

Mother, Sarah Ward, daughter of a New York 
country doctor. 

Boyhood, until 1877 spent in his father’s parishes, 
Wellsville, N. Y., Central Falls, R. I., Chilli- 
cothe, Missouri; Leroy, N. Y., Lansing, Michi- 
gan, and on a ranch in South Dakota. 

Schools: Public School grades, Yankton Academy, 
Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., graduating 
1879, Brown University, Providence, R. I., grad- 
uating 1883, Andover Theological Seminary, 
eraduating 1886. 

First Trip to Great Britain, Summer and Fall 1886. 

Began ministry at Waterbury, Vermont, as pastor 
of Congregational Church, 1886. 

Called to Central Congregational Church, Topeka, 
Kansas, 1888. 


ix 


x CHARLES M. SHELDON 


Began service there January, 1889. 

Married to Mary Abby Merriam, 1891. 

Birth of our only child, Merriam Ward Sheldon, 
1897. 

Wrote first story, and read it to Sunday evening 
congregation, 1891. ‘Title of story, ‘Richard 
Bruce, or the Life that Now Is.” 

From 1891 to 1919 wrote and read to Sunday 
evening audience thirty stories. 

“Tn His Steps” written and read to Sunday evening 
audience, 1896 and 1897. 

Published as serial in Chicago Advance same time. 

Published in book form, ten cent paper edition, 
1897. 

Owing to supposed defective copyright published 
by fifty different publishers in the United States 
and Europe. Over 22,000,000 copies have been 
published in over twenty different languages. 

Edited and controlled the Topeka Daily Capital one 
week, as a distinctively Christian daily, March, 
1900. Circulation, 367,000 daily. 

Made second trip to Great Britain for prohibition 

- campaign, 1900. 

Third trip International Christian Endeavor Con- 
vention, 1908. 

New Church Building dedicated, 1910. 

Made Minister at Large to conduct conferences, 
IgI2. 


CHARLES M. SHELDON xt 


Invited to Australia and New Zealand for prohi- 
bition campaign, 1914. 

Member of Flying Squadron under Governor J. 
Frank Hanly, in the interest of national prohibi- 
tion, from October, 1914, to May, 1915. 

Called to Central Church pastorate again, 1915. 

War Service, Great Britain, 1917 and 1918, under 
the direction of Sir George Hunter, of Newcastle- 
on-[yne, to conduct a campaign for national pro- 
hibition to protect American boys from drink en 
route to France. 

Resigned from Central Church, 1919. 

Accepted position as Editor-in-Chief, Christian 
Herald, New York, 1920. 

Degree of D.D. conferred by Brown University, 
1923. 

Forty year honor alumnus, class of 1883. 

Edited “Everyday Bible,” 1924. 

Resigned from Editor-in-Chief position on the 
Christian Herald, 1924. 

Retained as Contributing Editor, 1925. 

Present occupation, Lecturer and writer, and 
Preacher. 

Address, 1621 College Avenue, Topeka, Kansas. 


Rg batt yA 
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To THE AUDIENCE 


CONTENTS 


° ° ° ° e' e 


‘DATES AND OTHER INFORMATION . . . 


CHAPTER 
CHAPTER 
CHAPTER 
CHAPTER 


CHAPTER 


CHAPTER 


CHAPTER 
CHAPTER 
CHAPTER 
CHAPTER 


CHAPTER 


CHAPTER 


ONE 
Two 
THREE 
Four 


FIVE 


SIX 


SEVEN 
EIGHT 
NINE 
TEN 


ELEVEN 


BOYHOOD : ° ° ° 
SCHOOL LIFE ° . ° 
THE FIRST MINISTRY . 


THE STORY OF “IN HIS 
OTROS ANE ML enrol ae 


THE STORY OF A CHRIS- 
TIAN DAILY 


THE STORY OF THE FLY- 
ING SQUADRON 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 
THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 
THE KANSAS CHAPTER 


THE MINISTER’S CALL- 
TINGE eee he aero oan 


THE FIRST CHAPTER OF 
A ROMANCE BY MRS. 
SHELDON . : ° . 


TWELVE TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD 


AGE AND DEATH. . 


PAGE 
Vil 


1x 
19 
39 
66 


97 


II2 


144 
163 


199 
234 


262 


276 


289 





ILLUSTRATIONS 


Rey. Charles M. Sheldon 


Topeka—1920. . .. . .. . | Frontispiece 
Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., 1879 
NOE OO ae tel 48 
Andover mveniocieal Seminary ennai 
IVPASS oF OD ONC as 49 
Topeka, 1889. Ree Inines of ieee i 
Central Congregational Church . ae OO 
Where Central Congregational Church, To- 
peka, Kansas, Began 1889 Le SO 
Central Congregational Church, ae 
Kansas, 1925 nie uk OE 
Where “In His Steps” was written. Porch of 
Author’s Home, Topeka, Kansas, 1896 104 
The Author and 36 Different Editions of ‘In 
His Steps” POPME RPM Sh ream ya ay! 
“In His Steps” Translations . 105 
25 Separate Editions ‘In His Steps” 105 
100,000 Subscriptions to Topeka Daily Cap- 
ital, March, 1900 . Piet TOL CES 


aV 


Xvi ILLUSTRATIONS 

Sarah Ward Sheldon. The Mother of 
Charles M. Sheldon . A oN 

Father and Son, 1915 . 


Mary Abby Merriam (Mrs. Charles M. 
Sheldon) . MEMES ME SEE sO Uy. 


Merriam Ward Sheldon . 


Rey. Charles M. Sheldon, 
Forty Year Man. Class of 1886. Degree 
D.D. by Brown University, 1924 


176. 
EL Tay 


280 


281 


304 


BOYHOOD 33 


Texas cow and been sewed up with a three-cornered 
harness needle, and perhaps the only individual in 
the history of surgery to have that distinction. And 
in case any one is inclined to hesitate over this opera- 
tion I can only say I have as evidence the scar to 
show. The blue clay was applied every day and 
seemed to have healing qualities, hardening to such 
a degree as the heat of the wound went into it that 
mother had to use hot water to moisten it before 
it would come off to make room for a fresh handful. 
I do not like to say how long I was an invalid, but I 
am afraid I prolonged the period of convalescence a 
little on account of my eagerness to finish one of the 
Waverley novels which sister Alice secured for me, 
mentally commenting on the adventures of the char- 
acters in the book which was Ivanhoe, and saying to 
myself as I read of knightly duels and breathless 
attacks on castles, that after all, Scott’s heroes had 
never been hooked by a Texas cow as I had. And 
withal I fervently prayed the cow would never be 
found and brought back. To ease the mind of any 
one who cares to know I will say that several weeks 
afterwards we did find her in the brush down near 
the Missouri, but we could not catch her, and finally 
one of the neighbors who had been a cowboy, by 
father’s consent shot her for beef. We had some of 
the steak that winter, and while it was tough, I ate 
my piece without criticism, after the usual words of 


thanks had been said by father. 


34 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Three winters while on the farm I went into the 
little town of Yankton on the Missouri, and attended 
school. Part of the time I rode in on the mustang 
pony that had towed me at the end of his tail across 
the swollen swale, and part of the time I walked the 
six miles and did my share of the chores when I got 
home. The first school I attended was taught in a 
little building used part of the time as a law office. 
My teacher was my own uncle, Joseph Ward, my 
mother’s brother, afterwards President of Yankton 
College. That winter when I started in to get my 
first schooling uncle was pastor of the little home 
missionary church. He was the only teacher in town, 
and out of his school grew an academy where the 
next two winters I continued all the education I had 
in Dakota. I would like to say as I pass along that 
Uncle Joe was and is my man hero. He could have 
gone to congress or been elected Governor of Da- 
kota, but he stayed on in his parish, the most un- 
selfish, childlike, sacrificing minister of the Gospel 
in the Northwest. When I hear ministers complain- 
ing of their problems and of the burdens of their 
parishes, I see Uncle Joe in that little law office 
teaching that small group of raw material like me 
and then going to a sick parishioner’s and sawing 
wood for him and carrying it into the house before 
going home to prepare his next Sunday sermon. 

My academy school life started out rather awk- 
wardly for me seeing I was an unusually bashful and 


BOYHOOD 35 


retiring lad, because I found when the roll of my 
first class was called I was the only boy in a class of 
seventeen girls. Few boys could be spared, off the 
frontier farms, and that is the reason it seemed to 
me that first term I was going to a female academy. 
But I managed to get on fairly well, especially when 
I found out later that the girls were willing to ex- 
change their knowledge for mine. I was and am 
very dull in the department of mathematics. There 
were two girls who excelled in that deadly course, 
and I have always noticed that when girls are good 
mathematicians they are superior to men or boys. 
I had a great liking for Latin and by a mutual ar- 
rangement with the mathematicians who could not 
translate their Livy and Czsar I wrote out their 
lessons for the help they gave me in working out 
Sturm’s theorem and other mathematical puzzles. 
It looked like a fair exchange but I have never gone 
into the ethics of the case as perhaps I might have 
done later on when I got into the theological sem- 
inary. 

I soon found that I was brooding over the possi- 
bility of going east to enter Phillips Academy, An- 
dover, Massachusetts. My Uncle Joe had gradu- 
ated there and the stories he told of his school life 
entered my imagination and after long talks with 
the home folks they finally agreed to my going on. 
But I needed some Greek if I was going into the 
senior class at Andover, and my academy teacher, 


386 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


who happened to be a Yale graduate, began to take 
an interest in my school plans. Seeing I was the only 
student in the Academy taking a course in Greek and 
that I needed some place to study and recite, away 
from the noise and distraction of the one room the 
Academy boasted, he had built for my special case a 
small room, so-called, in one corner of the big room. 
It was nothing more than a matched floor board 
siding put up without any top. It had a very small 
door, and inside, a bench just wide enough and long 
enough to hold the teacher and myself. I wrote out 
the Greek paradigms on a small blackboard, but 
some of the compound words were so long, like 
‘‘Aperaskuotatosseisin,”’ that the blackboard was not 
wide enough to hold them, and I ran the syllables 
over onto the door and when the door was opened 
the word was broken in two. But in that confined 
place I first made the acquaintance with Homer, and 
the teacher whose knees literally touched mine as we 
sat together in that boarded up corner had enough 
humor to say to me one day that it was a case of 
“Greek meets Greek,” and in the battle royal that 
went on there I owe him thanks for the patience and 
interest he showed in behalf of the one student (I 
cannot say ‘“‘scholar’”’) who had ever taken a Greek 
course in that school. 

Before I left Dakota for Andover I joined my 
Uncle Joe’s little church in Yankton. My father 
and mother both had serious talks with me about 


BOYHOOD 37 


conversion. ‘The last winter I spent on the farm 
Uncle Joe was holding ‘‘protracted’”’ meetings in a 
small hall in the town. Night after night we all 
drove in from the farm to attend these meetings, 
getting home some time after midnight. Father was 
specially anxious for me to make a public confession 
of my Christian faith before the meetings closed. 
Night after night I heard the invitation from Uncle 
Joe to any who wanted to confess Christ to stand up. 
I felt the need of making such a public stand, but 
I am obliged to say that for several weeks I lived 
an inward life of wretched fear. Religion was a 
terrible experience it seemed to me. But I could not 
escape the conviction that if I was ever to become a 
Christian I must let the world know it. The night 
when I did by sheer strength pull my trembling body 
up from that bench in that little hall and stand with 
a few others, I had a mental relaxation that was like 
a physical weight taken suddenly off of my spirit. I 
had at least redeemed myself from the charge of 
cowardice that had been torturing me, and the ordeal 
of meeting the committee that examined candidates 
seemed less fearful as I looked forward to church 
membership. 

When that time came I faced the circle of deacons 
with some trepidation, but there were other boys 
with me, and while I am frank to say I did not un- 
derstand then, and do not now, some of the doc- 
trinal questions put to me and to which I had to give 


- 


88 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


some kind of assent before I could join the church, 
I went on to the actual day when I was received into 
full membership and partook of my first communion, 
with what I believe was a true acceptance of the 
terms of Christian discipleship as I understood them. 
My father and mother were supremely happy that 
day. I was going away from home, soon, entering 
new worlds of temptation. Now that I had taken 
the vows of the Christian and was a member of the 
church those dangers became less terrifying to them, 
and distinctly less for myself. 

I can see mother as she stood by the door that 
day when I went into town for the last time to take 
the train for Chicago and the East. And if ever a 
boy began a new and unusual chapter in his life 
with a cloud of direction by day and a pillar of en- 
lightening fire by night I was the boy, breaking the 
home ties, but bound by them all through the pass- 
ing years as in the vision of the farm I went again 
and again into that end of the log house called the 
“parlor,” and saw father and mother kneeling there 
at the family altar praying for the absent lad every 
morning at family prayers. 


CHAPTER TWO 
SCHOOL LIFE 


Up to the time I left the Dakota homestead farm 
I had not traveled to any extent, except when father 
changed his parish from Wellsville, New York, 
where I was born, to Central Falls, Rhode Island, 
after that to Chillicothe, Missouri, and then to Lan- 
sing, Michigan. While pastor of a church there 
father’s health broke, and when my uncle Joseph 
Ward stopped to see us on his way to Dakota with 
his young bride to take up his work in a home mis- 
sionary church, I was ten years old. 

Uncle was urging my father and mother to plan 
to come out to the new territory and live the health- 
ful life of the pioneer. I listened to all the talk at 
the table, and said nothing. But the next morning, 
the day Uncle and Aunt were to start for the wild 
west, I came down from my little bedroom with a 
small satchel packed with a few things I wanted to 
take and said, “‘I have decided to go out to Dakota 
with Uncle Joe.” 

That settled it. The family agreed to let me go 
on ahead with Uncle and Aunt, and live with them 
until the rest of the folks could pack up and follow. 

39 


40 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


But it was several months before they arrived. 
When they did come, father took up a homestead 
claim, bought a span of mules and a lumber wagon 
and a breaking plow, went down on the river and cut 
cottonwood trees into logs, and hauled them out 
to the quarter section where the house was built, and 
where my early boyhood was spent. Father recov- 
ered his full health, lived to be the Home Mission- 
ary Superintendent for a territory bigger than all 
Massachusetts and Connecticut, established over 100 
churches, most of which are thriving to-day, and 
lived to ninety years, surviving all the doctors who 
told him he was going out to Dakota to die. 

I am throwing this in here partly to explain how 
hard it has been always to kill off early members of 
our family, and also to anticipate the chapter on 
travel which will be found somewhere in this story. 
Beginning with that lonesome journey from the 
prairie of Dakota to Andover, Massachusetts, as the 
years passed it seems to have been a part of the pro- 
gram of my life to be going somewhere a good part 
of the time. Father had the same wanderlust as a 
young man, the only one of a large family of boys 
and girls born on a farm in western New York to 
leave the farm. | 

I reached Phillips Academy in time for the fall 
term, a perfect stranger to every one and every- 
thing. As I went up the long hill to the Academy 
buildings and registered in the little office where 


SCHOOL LIFE 41 


groups of new boys were waiting in homesick poses, 
I began to realize the fact that I was much older 
than most of them. I was nineteen, at least three 
years in advance of the majority at Phillips. But 
while I was rangy and muscular, thanks to the rugged 
farm life, | was immature in my own thought of my- 
self, and exceedingly diffident at this stage of my de- 
velopment. I did not feel any older in years than 
the youngest boy in the school, although I found 
after the first plunge into the school stream that I 
was looked upon as a good deal older. ‘This had its 
advantages as well as its drawbacks, but I did not 
discover either until later in the term. 

I was assigned for my room to the upper story of 
a small frame building in a row of similar buildings 
called Latin Commons. They looked very much like 
the rows of factory tenements I had seen as I passed 
small factory towns on my way to Andover from 
Boston. The Registrar introduced me to another 
boy who would be my roommate, as the rules of the 
Commons did not allow any boy to have a room all 
to himself. We looked each other over very much 
as two strange dogs on their first meeting and I made 
up my mind that if it should come to any physical 
settlement of differences I could easily argue him 
to my way of thinking. He was slightly taller than 
I was, but flabby of build and wobbly on his feet. 

We went up to our room together and unpacked 
our things after agreeing peaceably to the choice of 


42 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


bedrooms. Which was not difficult as there was no 
choice. There was one study room for both of us, 
and the two bedrooms opened immediately from it, 
just large enough to hold a single bed and leave a 
small piece of floor barely large enough to hold a 
washstand, and permit a student to walk in be- 
tween the bed and the wall if he went in sidewise. 
There was a window at the end, looking out over the 
campus toward Lawrence. This window (I use 
the term generically, for it applied to every window 
in every one of the Commons) was well ventilated, 
owing to the fact that the panes had been broken 
and reset so many times that there was almost no 
sash left between the panes. We found also in a 
short time that the principal use of the window be- 
sides ventilating the bedroom was to use as a con- 
venient outlet for our ashes, throwing them out just 
when a group of students might be coming around 
the corner of the building, and the wind was favor- 
able. 

The first thing my new chum did was to take out 
very long safety pins from his bag and pin down the 
sheets and the one quilt of his bed to the mattress 
next the wall, and a similar row pinned in a like man- 
ner to the foot. He explained as he did it that it 
would save making up his bed every morning or 
night, as all he had to do on retiring was to open one 
corner and draw himself in, and in the morning re- 
verse the process as he came out. Besides, he said, 


SCHOOL LIFE 43 


the bed clothing was short and the pins would pre- 
vent the covers from being pulled off. It was an in- 
genious plan and it seemed to work with him, but 
I had been brought up differently and I did not fol- 
low his example. Several cold winter nights when 
the rigorous New England winter was at its height, 
and I lay shivering under bed clothes that were too 
short to cover my length, I wished T had. 

By mutual agreement we made what we thought 
was a fair division of the room work. I agreed to 
sweep out the rooms and get the water, and bring up 
the coal if he would build the fire, and see that it 
did not go out when we did. He also agreed to 
sweep down our stairs when necessary. ‘This agree- 
ment went no farther, he was strong to declare, than 
to sweep down our flight leaving the results on the 
next landing which was directly in front of the door 
of the two boys who lived in the room under ours. 

I do not recall exactly how it happened that first 
winter, or what was the exact technicality that made 
the event possible, but during one of the most frigid 
weeks, the fire in the little stove went out one night 
and in the morning my roommate refused to make it 
again. I think he claimed that I had not lived up to 
my agreement to bring the proper amount of water. 
But in any case we parted company at that point. He 
refused to rebuild the fire and I would not. For a 
whole week we sat around bundled up in heavy over- 
coats or took refuge in the other fellows’ rooms to 


44 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


get warm. One night while I was trying to write a 
letter home the ink froze on my pen and the water 
in the bedroom wash basin was a chunk of ice. The 
Principal, Dr. Bancroft, at last in some way heard 
of the deadlock, and actually called on us one evening 
as we sat at our little desks, the icy breath from our 
mouths streaming across the room, as we sat there 
in silence, each one firm in his stubbornness to freeze 
to death before he would build that fire. After hear- 
ing all the evidence, for if any man was the soul of 
justice in that boys’ school that great teacher was, 
he quietly told my roommate to build the fire and he 
stayed in the room until he did it. Of course I felt 
vindicated, and I would have indulged in a chuckle 
of self-satisfaction if the Doctor had not said as he 
went out of the room, “Sheldon, I didn’t think you 
were such a fool, even if you did have the right of 
it | 

This made my roommate feel so happy that we 
both shook hands and almost sat on the stove to- 
gether, while I dwelt long and silently on that say- 
ing of my afterward revered teacher. At the same 
time I don’t know to this day what effect it would 
have had on my roommate if I had given in and per- 
formed a duty which by right belonged to him. It 
was a fine point in casuistry, but it was also a wonder 
that neither of us caught cold during that absurd 
week. ‘There must have been some ethical value to 
it all, for my peculiar roommate and I for a while at 


SCHOOL LIFE 45 


least seemed to get on better, although I never under- 
stood him, and I think he often wondered a good 
deal over the queer sort of fellow he had been 
quartered on. 

I soon found that my school preparation for 
Andover was not sufficient to allow me to enter the 
Senior class, and so I had to drop down into the 
Middle class, which meant two years at Phillips 
instead of one as I had planned. I was disappointed 
at first, but in a short time I was more than con- 
tented. ‘Those two years at Phillips Academy, An- 
dover, will always seem to me to be the most enjoy- 
able school years of my life. 

It was a genuine boys’ school, with plenty of study 
and fun mixed with the proportion of study to fun 
in the ratio of about seven to one. But the study 
itself was fun in the right sense. ‘The teachers, 
beginning with that prince of teachers, the Principal, 
C. F. P. Bancroft, were good teachers judged by 
any standard. We called the Principal ‘“Banty”’ 
but it was a term of affection, not of jest, and when 
he rose to make his morning chapel talk every Fri- 
day morning there was not one of the reckless, 
thoughtless and sometimes coarse and often home- 
sick boys in that room who did not gaze upon that 
noble head and shoulders with a feeling of awe and 
respect, mingled often with a degree of wholesome 


fear. If England has her Arnold, America has her 


46 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Bancroft. It does not do any harm to the facts 
to make this comparison. 

The folks at home could help pay part of my ex- 
penses, but not all, and I soon found myself in a 
group of boys working their way through. One 
winter, the first, I swept out the Academy building, 
for which I received three dollars a week. It was a 
large structure with many classrooms that seemed 
built with special reference to collecting dirt and 
dust. I swept out the entire building on Wednes- 
day and Saturday afternoons. It took me until 
supper time to do it. I have a vague remembrance 
of sometimes stopping at my task and looking out 
of a window at a baseball game going on between 
Phillips, Andover and Phillips, Exeter, or a football 
game between the Harvard Freshmen and our team, 
and wishing I could be there. But the three dollars 
a week paid my board at the Shawsheen Club for a 
week and one dollar and a quarter over. Board 
at the Shawsheen was one seventy-five a week, and 
there was a roar from the boys if the steward let 
it run over that amount. 7 

The second winter I secured the job of mending 
the broken glass in the Commons, for which I re- 
ceived a New England shilling for each pane, six- 
teen and two-thirds cents. A good deal of glass was 
broken during the winter on account of snowball 
fights around the buildings. There was a rumor, 
I can assure you all without foundation, that the 


SCHOOL LIFE AT 


boy who mended the glass started some of these 
fights by throwing snowballs on the boys out of 
the windows of the Commons. What I do know is 
that it was a lucrative trade while it lasted, but I 
was greatly put to it often to make the glass stay 
in the window owing to the fact that after several 
resettings there was really no wood left to hold the 
putty which was the only thing that held the panes in 
place, and that meant more putty which meant cut- 
ting into my profits. 

That same winter I also had two other jobs which 
I think of with mingled feelings of pleasure and 
grief. One was pumping the organ Sundays at the 
Seminary Chapel services morning and afternoon, 
and the other was waiting on Professor Austin 
Phelps of the Theological Seminary every evening 
to give him massage for an hour and then for an- 
other hour read out loud to him for the purpose of 
putting him to sleep. He was troubled with hypo- 
chondria and insomnia, and the massage and the 
reading combined seemed to fit his case. 

[ was not yet all through my physical growth, 
and when Sunday came I was healthily tired after all 
the week’s study and chores. If I had been allowed 
to do what I often felt the need of doing I would 
have slept a good part of Sunday. But chapel 
attendance was compulsory both morning and after- 
noon. To add to my necessary income I secured 
the job (I use the word “job” with discretion), of 


48 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


blowing the organ at both services and I think 
without displaying any undue egotism I earned my 
salary. The place where the blower handle was put 
was,in a very hot and dark corner, between the back 
of the organ and the curtain which hung between 
the organ and the pulpit. It is no exaggeration to 
say that the preachers at the chapel services some- 
times preached very long and not always very ex- 
citing sermons to us boys who ‘were not interested 
in the coming controversy over the second probation 
of the heathen or the two Isaiahs. One very hot 
Sunday afternoon in my hot coop I fell asleep 
over the handle of the blower, and did not wake up 
in time to hear the preacher give out the closing 
hymn. The organist, who by «he way was a very 
pretty teacher at the Fem Sem Academy near ours, 
and with whom for several weeks I believe I was 
desperately in love, although she must have been 
fifteen years my senior, started to play, but there 
was a painful silence. Every boy in the congrega- 
tion waked up. . She tried again, with the same re- 
sult. Then she came around to where I was sleep- 
ing the sleep of the just and shook my shoulder. 
I waked up with a start from Love’s fond dream, — 
and seized the handle of the blower and worked 
it so vigorously that that hymn must have been a 
staccato of some triumphal king’s entry into a cap- 
tured town, although if I remember the hymn rightly 
it began with the words ‘“‘Calm me, O Lord, and 





PHILLIPS ACADEMY, ANDOVER, MASS. 1879. 
AGE 22. 








ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, 
ANDOVER, Mass. 1886. 


SCHOOL LIFE 49 


keep me calm.” But I am sure that I never fell 
asleep again at my post, although with some mel- 
ancholy I realized that my feelings for the pretty 
organist faded away from that day. An organ 
blower cannot have his shoulder shaken by the or- 
ganist without creating a coolness between the 
shaker and the shaken. 

My other task at Professor Austin Phelps’ was 
so unusual and so interesting that I hardly know 
how to describe it. But this is what I actually did 
every night all winter. I reported at the Pro- 
fessor’s house, a beautiful specimen of colonial arch- 
itecture, a few minutes before seven o'clock. 

I was let into the house by one of two old ser- 
vants who were devoted passionately to the Pro- 
fessor, and at once I went upstairs to the huge 
square bedroom where the Professor would be al- 
ready retired. For one exact hour, from seven to 
eight I gave him a massage treatment, after he 
had initiated me into the particular movements he 
wanted me to learn. I mastered these within a week 
and after that he let me continue the treatment 
with only now and then an occasional word of direc- 
tion. 

At eight o’clock I started to read out loud in the 
book he selected, and I read until nine o’clock. Gen- 
erally he would begin to fall asleep shortly after 
I began the reading, but my instructions were to go 
on reading until the hour was up. It may sound 


50 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


almost incredible and it does even to me now, but 
during that winter at the Professor’s I read out 
loud, generally with no other listener than my own 
self, the whole of Bancroft’s ‘“‘History of the United 
States” as far as the volumes were published, all of 
Motley’s ‘‘Rise of the Dutch Republic,” all of De 
Quincey, Charles Lamb’s essays, several plays of 
Shakespeare, and a good part of Milton’s “‘Paradise 
Lost.” 

When I left the room and went downstairs, I 
would sometimes be invited by one of the servants to 
stop and drink a glass of cold milk or eat a sand- 
wich. At such times Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the 
Professor’s daughter of whom I stood in awe be- 
cause she was a noted author, would speak to me, 
and ask me to stay long enough to write a few 
letters for her to her fishermen friends in Gloucester. 
She paid me for this, although I would have pre- 
ferred to do it for the great honor I felt in being 
her amanuensis. By the time I had come back to 
my room in the Commons it would be half past nine, 
and I would have several lessons to get before going 
to bed. 

For all this I received fifty cents a night, so that 
adding one dollar the seminary trustees gave me for 
blowing the organ when I was awake, the money 
received for mending glass and extra amounts I 
earned for pumping water for a number of boarding 
houses, and blacking boots Saturday nights for some 


SCHOOL LIFE 51 


of the more dressy teachers I managed to save 
enough out of my expenses for board and fuel and 
clothing and books to go down to Boston occasion- 
ally and see the sights of a great city. 

There was a famous old book stall on Washing- 
ton Street called The Archway. On the few occa- 
sions when I went to Boston I always found my way 
to this spot and browsed among the new and second 
hand books, occasionally buying one. There were 
bargains at The Archway and my pocket book, even 
with the income I was earning, made me a bargain 
hunter, and besides my Scotch-Irish inheritance of 
saving was more pronounced than it has been in 
later years. 

Going over the shelves on a late afternoon when 
I had gone in on a Saturday at the beginning of 
the Christmas vacation when most of the boys had 
gone home, I came across a large red bound book 
of which I had heard and wanted very much to read, 
‘Tes Miserables.”” It was translated by Cournal, 
and bound in strong fashion, with clear type and 
good paper. [ inquired the price and it was an even 
dollar. I gave the bookman the dollar, and walked 
out on the street, proud of my purchase, and antici- 
pating a rare treat in the reading as I was almost 
alone in my room for two weeks. My roommate 
lived somewhere in New Hampshire and had de- 
parted, leaving me with the freedom of the three 
rooms and nothing to do but build the fire. 


52 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


But I was only a step on the sidewalk when I 
felt in my pocket and realized that I had given 
nearly all the money I had for “Les Miserables,” 
and had only seventeen cents left. ‘The fare from 
Boston to Andover on the Boston and Maine was 
sixty-three cents. The distance was twenty-one 
miles by rail and twenty-three by road. 

For a minute I debated on the question of taking 
the book back and asking for my dollar. I was a 
total stranger in the city. None of the schoolboys 
were with me. I had not eaten anything since 
morning, and it was beginning to drizzle over a 
crust of snow. 

But I finally decided to keep “Les Miserables,” 
and walk to Andover over the railroad track. 
Which I did, getting there after getting a cup of 
coffee and a sandwich, at about two o’clock in the 
morning. Fortunately the drizzle did not develop 
into anything worse than a scattering sleet storm. 
I had a good overcoat and the book suffered no 
harm. When I had reached my room, I built a good 
fire, lighted my German student lamp, pushed my 
small desk up near the stove, opened ‘‘Les Misera- 
bles” and finished the first book, Fantine, by the time 
the winter dawn light came in to remind me that it 
was time to go to bed. I finished the whole book 
before the holidays were over, and read it again 
during the spring term. After getting into the 
Theological seminary four years later I read it out 


SCHOOL LIFE 58 


loud to my college chum who had come back to 
Andover to teach Greek in the Academy, while I 
was a theologue across the street. His eyes were 
poor and in the evening he would come over to my 
room to rest himself while I read far into the night 
the tragic story of Jean Valjean. 

My class at Phillips was the class of ’79. It 
numbered over 60 and immediately on graduating 
it scattered, going to Yale, Amherst, Harvard, 
Williams, Princeton, and Brown. Nearly every 
member of the class went on to some college. Six 
of us went on down to Brown University, Provi- 
dence, and another period, lasting four years, of 
school life began for me. I left Andover with gen- 
uine regret. Those two years mean more to me 
than almost any other two years of my school life 
of nine years in all, not counting the school in 
Dakota. Perhaps because it was a new experience 
coming off that wild farm. Perhaps because of the 
real look at learning which my teachers gave me. 
For after all, it was the teachers at Andover that I 
have always held longest in my esteem. And [ still 
entertain the idea that a boys’ school is valuable not 
for its mechanical and scientific equipment, but for 
its teaching force. 

I went to Brown University partly because my 
Uncle Joe had graduated there, and partly to be 
with my classmate, Mr. M. C. Gile, who afterwards 
became the head of the Academy at Colorado Col- 


54 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


lege. We roomed together for the four years, and 
we were together at Andover for three years more 
while he taught in the Academy and I was learning 
Hebrew and church history in the Seminary. Nine 
years we were together. I loved him with a David- 
Jonathan affection. He is a part of my whole uni- 
versity life. When he died out there in Colorado 
a few years ago, I lost my college “chum” and 
there has been none other since to take his place. 

I suppose one college experience is much like an- 
other. Mine had no unusual happenings. Among 
the things that stand out for me are the struggles 
I had to understand mathematics. I had no trouble 
with trigonometry or calculus, or geometry, but 
for some reason which my teachers never found out 
I could not do anything with algebraic problems. 
Night after night I sat up with them, but it was like 
sitting up with a corpse, but it did not resemble 
a wake. The week before the graduation of my 
class | wentto the President and told him I knew 
I could not pass the examinations in mathematics, 
and was not entitled to a degree, but that I con- 
sidered the four years in the university had given 
me all I deserved. I heard afterwards that he 
took my case up with the professor of mathematics, 
and the Board of Trustees, and in some way, when 
Commencement day came I did receive a degree, 
and it was worded just like my chum’s who was the 
brilliant mathematician of the class. I do not know 


SCHOOL LIFE 55 


just what comment to make on this incident, so I 
will pass on to the next. 

As was the case at Andover I still felt the need 
of working my way through. The folks at home 
were sacrificing, but one year the grasshoppers ate 
up all the crops, another year a terrific hail storm 
destroyed everything, and a third year prices were 
so small there was no income worth mentioning. So 
at every opportunity I did what I could to earn 
enough to pay my tuition and my board. One winter 
the city of Providence opened night schools for 
working men and boys. My chum and I secured 
positions as teachers in one of these schools situated 
in an outlying factory district. We received one 
dollar each night for two hours’ teaching, but it 
was so far out that we had to pay ten cents each 
way on the cars to get to the building. 

I hesitate to go into details of that night school. 
There were times when there was a good deal more 
‘lickin’ ” than “‘larnin’.”” The rough element among 
the older factory boys often came in to make trou- 
ble. They were more interested in getting the 
teachers into a fight than in getting an education 
into themselves. I was in training for a tennis 
tournament (and may I be permitted to say that 
when it came off I won it), and my farm life had 
given me experience in dealing with bucking ponies 
and ornery mules. But I was naturally of a peace- 
ful disposition. In fact I have the reputation at 


56 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


this writing of being a pacifist. But when a burly 
factory hand swaggered into the school room and 
began to torment the smaller boys who had come to 
study and learn, there did not seem to be any way 
to conduct that school properly except to seize the 
bully by the coat collar and throw him out. 

As a matter of fact that was a good part of the 
curriculum in that school that winter. I would 
not dare say how many boys I threw downstairs 
in order to earn my dollar from the Board of Edu- 
cation. [here was generally a policeman at the 
foot of the stairs to do the rest, and when we started 
to get our car home after the session was over we 
had police protection from the gang that would be 
waiting for us to beat us up. The whole course was 
excellent exercise practice for the tennis tournament, 
and I emerged at the end of the night school session 
in fine physical condition, entitled to a diploma as 
a teacher of higher gymnastics. 

When the summer vacation periods came around 
during the four year college course I was too far 
from home to go there, and the expense made it 
prohibitive, so I generally found work to do every 
summer. In my Sophomore year I joined a small 
group of students in the same far-away-from-home- 
class and we went up to Wolfboro, New Hampshire, 
and I took a position as a waiter in the Pavilion 
Hotel on Lake Winnepesaukee. ‘The pay was twelve 
dollars a month and board and room. The hours 


SCHOOL LIFE 57 


were from six in the morning to nine at night, with 
three hours off in the afternoon. The guests at my 
table were mostly from Boston. They were for the 
most part good natured people who did not com- 
plain even when I made mistakes in bringing in their 
orders. One day an elderly man who looked to 
me like a professor and afterwards turned out to be 
one, spoke sharply to me about a piece of roast beef 
which was not done enough to suit his taste. I 
ventured to give him a line from Homer in Greek 
in which the poet speaks of the good “red” oxen. 
He was Greek scholar enough to know the line and 
instantly became friendly. He was my most in- 
teresting guest while he stayed at the hotel, and the 
morning he went away, he left a ten dollar bill at 
his place. It is the largest fee I have ever received 
as a hotel waiter, and it has made me feel kindly 
towards hotel waiters ever since. I abominate the 
entire feeing system in hotels, but I generally leave 
something for the waiter when I go away. 

During the vacation following my Junior year I 
obtained a position as a hand, “‘slinging clams” at a 
Rhode Island resort called Rocky Point on Narra- 
gansett Bay. My work there consisted in getting 
up at daylight and cleaning up the grounds around 
the big dining hall, picking up paper bags and sweep- 
ing up peanut shells and all the litter made by the 
thousands of excursionists who came down by boat 
loads from Providence. My main job was bringing 


58 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


in hot baked clams from the pile outdoors into 
the hall and putting the dishes down in front of the 
people who sat each side of bare tables one hun- 
dred feet long. It was a rough life, and I cannot 
say I enjoyed any part of it except the meal hours 
for the waiters, at which time we certainly fared 
highly on clams, clam chowder, blue fish, clam frit- 
ters, roast corn and watermelon. Every Sunday 
during this summer I went up to Providence and 
sang in a church quartette, for which I received one 
dollar a Sunday. I never thought I was much of a 
singer, although I was on the college glee club, and 
I treasured this Sunday dollar with a peculiar pride 
that I have seldom felt for any dollar I have earned 
since then. 

It was during my Junior year at Brown that a 
small group of students in our hall began to write 
articles for publication. Most of our productions 
went up to Boston to the Youth’s Companion. I 
was already one of the editors on the college paper, 
and was acquiring a taste for writing. It seemed 
the height of power to get something into a maga- 
zine and I shall never forget the first yellow slip of 
a check I received from the Youth’s Companion for 
a short article of three hundred words. Our group 
would write several articles apiece and then meet to 
read them to one another and criticize them without 
mercy. Then we would revise and send the entire 
‘grist to the editor. He was a most unusual person 


SCHOOL LIFE 59 


for an editor, and I do not know how he came to be 
an editor, but he was exceedingly friendly to our 
amateur attempts and wrote us letters of advice 
about writing, and gave us very valuable sugges- 
tions. The price paid for the average article that 
the Companion accepted was two dollars, sometimes 
five. During that period I must have written a 
bushel of articles and out of them had a dozen 
accepted. I kept some of the rejected articles and 
during my Theological Seminary course I rewrote 
them and submitted them to the Companion again, 
and some of them were taken and paid for. I am 
inclined to believe that by that time there might 
have been another editor. De gustibus in manu- 
scriptibus non disputandum. 

One chapter in my university life that meant 
much to me was my membership in the Delta Upsi- 
lon Society. It was an open Greek letter society 
in my time, and strictly literary. We met every 
Friday night and carried out a full program of par- 
liamentary law practice, followed by a debate on 
some very profound subject, then an essay, an ora- 
tion, some original music by one of the members, an 
original poem and a closing critique which was made 
by some member chosen at the beginning of the 
meeting whose business it was to call attention to 
every mistake or misquotation of any speaker. The 
whole thing was most valuable and I am unable in 
passing to avoid comparison of our program of a 


60 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


college society with that of the regular college 
fraternities to-day, which so far as I have been able 
to observe have no program of any literary sort, but 
exist mainly for the social factor, degenerating 
sometimes into snobbery and jazz and expensive 
banquetting and a fictitious brotherhood. By this 
time any one who has read this far will perhaps be 
inclined to think that I do not believe very much in 
the present day college Greek letter societies. I am 
frank to say I do not, because I cannot see what 
valuable contribution they make, as they are or- 
ganized, to a student’s real life. They seem to me 
like little children’s toy games, instead of the great 
and manly game of life. They furnish college 
authorities with problems instead of helps to the 
educational process. 

My next period of school life was a period of 
three years immediately following the University, 
at Andover Theological Seminary. I entered the 
class of 1886 just at the time of the famous An- 
dover controversy over what was known as the 
“Second Probation” question. All there was to it 
was the opinion expressed by the more liberal group 
in the Seminary and some of the churches that pos- 
sibly the heathen who had died without ever hear- 
ing of Christ might have an opportunity in the next 
world to repent and be saved. Around this ques- 
tion fierce debate arose, dividing the pastors all over 
New England, and exposing certain professors in 


SCHOOL LIFE 61 


the seminary to charges of treason and heresy. 
During the three years I was in the seminary this 
controversy went on and some time afterwards. It 
was forgotten long ago, just as the present contro- 
versy going on over the doctrines in dispute in the 
camps of the fundamentalists and modernists will 
be forgotten in a few years from now. 

I enjoyed my seminary course more than my 
university course for several reasons. I was not 
under the pressure of the grind of recitations and 
examinations that went on at college, and the fact 
that I had settled down to my choice of life work 
was a steadying factor. The principal courses at 
the seminary were Hebrew, New Testament Greek, 
church history, and large quantities of homiletics 
and sermon making. And yet as I recall the courses 
there was almost nothing taught about Bible schools 
or how to preach to boys and girls or meet the needs 
of common men and women. After trying to preach 
in a parish full of young people and children, I 
found that my sermon preparation had been taught 
me almost altogether to make me prepared men- 
tally to speak or write for grown up audiences, logi- 
cal treatises, put together with skill, and in language 
that was chaste and polite. I hope I am not criticiz- 
ing in any cheap fashion those who were my teachers 
so much as the general plan and thought of what a 
theological seminary ought to be. All I know is 
that I had to learn by hard knocks after I left the 


62 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


seminary many of the necessary things that belong 
to the ministry that the seminary never even hinted 
at as necessary. I suppose that is true of all educa- 
tional systems. About all any of them can do is to 
give the student a shove and then let him do the rest 
of the steering himself. 

I was not allowed by the Seminary rules to do any 
preaching until the Senior year. The first call I 
had to supply any pulpit came to me, however, when 
I was in the university, and in writing home about 
that event I said: “It seems strange to think of writ- 
ing my first sermon, and I do not know but what I 
would do better to speak without notes. But in 
either event I must prepare something as I hear the 
congregation is a large one.” 

Inasmuch as my method for sermon delivery has 
been generally without notes that letter written in 
1880 is as interesting to me as to any one. But it 
seems that at least six years elapsed between that 
first sermonic attempt until I was called to preach 
at a number of small churches that had no regular 
supplies, during my Senior year at Andover. 

The modest fees that went with these supplies 
that year, together with some checks I received from 
my old friend, the Youth’s Companion, helped me 
through the three years’ Seminary course, my an- 
nual expenses being less than $400 all told. So that 
when I graduated with a degree of B.D. I had no 
debts nor anything else in the way of future service 


SCHOOL LIFE 63 


in any church. On account of the general excite- 
ment over the theological controversies that raged 
around Andover Seminary, the graduates, especially 
those of our class, were regarded with more or less 
suspicion as tainted with dangerous heresy. No 
one seemed to want me as a preacher or pastor, and 
it was not until I had left Andover hill and gone 
home to the folks who had in the interval between 
my entrance into the Seminary and my graduation 
moved to Salem, that I received a call to the pulpit 
of the Congregational church in Waterbury, Ver- 
mont. I was not wanted there, however, until Octo- 
ber, and while I was waiting to make my decision 
on the call, a letter came to me from Dr. Lyman 
Abbott, who was then editor of The Outlook, ofter- 
ing me a place on The Outlook to make my own 
department as a writer. I think some one of the 
teachers in the Seminary must have written him. 
The invitation was an enticing one. I hesitated over 
it. I had trained myself to be a minister. I had 
made all my studies to adapt them to that end. 
But I also had a very strong leaning towards jour- 
nalism. I had a real struggle to make my final 
choice, but I wrote at last to Dr. Abbott declining 
his offer and in the same mail I sent to Waterbury 
my acceptance of the call to the little country town 
church. I have never regretted that choice, but I 
have often wondered at the probable wonderful 
time I might have had in the companionship and 


64 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


friendship of that great editor and writer. I won- 
der if there are very often two equally desirable 
choices open to the sons of men, either one of which 
may cause him to have lifelong desires, not regrets, 
but whispering wishes. | 

Following a period of nine years’ continuous 
school life, I found myself with father’s old wander- 
lust on me. I did not have a cent left after the 
nine years’ expenses, but a friend in Salem learned 
in some way of the longing I had expressed in the 
family circle for a trip to England. It seems to me 
now like a story out of a fairy book, but this friend, 
who was a thrifty New Englander, offered to loan 
me a small amount without interest, asking only my 
note, to be payed back when I was receiving a salary 
from my prospective church in Waterbury. I bor- 
rowed $200 from him, and with one small bag 
carrying a few necessary articles I sailed on the 
Cunard steamer, the Cephalonia, from Boston for 
Liverpool, in the Intermediate cabin, paying the 
Cunard Company $35 for my board and passage. 
That left me about $160 when I landed at King 
Georges’ wharf, Liverpool, in the last of June, 
1886. I spent a little over $100 in London, and 
stayed there through July and August. And one 
day when I felt in my pocket and counted out just 
enough to get back to the United States again, I 
took my last walk through Westminster Abbey, and 
St. Paul’s and then went down to the American 


SCHOOL LIFE 65 


Steamship Company’s office and paid $50 for a 
first class cabin return ticket to New York. When 
I landed in New York I had just fifteen cents in 
American money, an English farthing and a few 
souvenirs, assets over all liabilities, and I was 
$5.30 worth of railroad fare distant from Salem, 
Mass., where the folks still lived. I pawned my 
watch to raise the necessary railroad fare, and have 
never redeemed it. If I remember the facts, father 
paid my fare to Waterbury, Vermont, and I began 
my ministry there in October of the year 1886 at the 
age of 29, with an empty pocket book, a sound body, 
an ambitious spirit, and a genuine desire in my heart 
to love the church and honor my first ministry. But 
the wildest stretch of my imagination gave me no 
hint of the fact that in Waterbury, a little quiet hill 
town, I was to meet the young woman who was to be 
my wife. I have sometimes wondered what she 
thought of me the first time she saw me. It ought 
to make good reading if she ever gets it into print. 


CHAPTER THREE 


MY FIRST MINISTRY, WATERBURY, 
VERMONT 


BEGINNING OF MINISTRY 


Waterbury, Vermont, lies in among the Green 
Mountains, a most beautiful spot, and when I began 
my ministry there it had in the township about 
seven hundred people. There were two churches in 
the town, a Methodist and a Congregational. There 
was a Main Street, and another crossing it. The 
church was known locally as the “Congo” church. 
I have never heard that abbreviation anywhere else. 
It was organized in the old New England fashion 
with a church membership group and a Parish 
group. In the Parish were men and women who did 
not belong to the church, but they had a vote in 
calling or dismissing the minister. Indeed, no min- 
ister could be called as pastor without a joint action ~ 
by both the church and the Parish. I was so called 
by both bodies. The pews in the church were owned 
in fee simple by the members of the church and 
Parish, and in a man’s will he often included “One 
pew in the Congregational church,” which went to 


his heirs and assigns. 
66 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 67 


I was not married and I boarded at the one 
hotel on the main street, paying four dollars a week 
for my room and meals. My salary was nine hun- 
dred dollars, raised by subscription. As soon as I 
had saved the amount out of that salary I returned 
to the Salem friend the $200 that he had loaned 
me for my trip to England. I think that was some- 
time about the middle of the first winter. 

My ambition as I began my ministry in this little 
town was to be a preacher. I was not in love with 
any one at this time, and the shyness that had been 
a feature of my boyhood had pursued me up to 
my twenty-ninth year, and I think the young women 
in the parish regarded me with some disapproval 
because I would not invite them sometimes to take 
a ride in the little old buggy bequeathed to me by 
the former minister who had also added to it a pony 
known and loved all over the township, and called 
‘Pony Bly.”” The old minister always had the buggy 
full of girls and boys as he drove around on his 
parish calls. ‘The public did not see why the habit 
was discontinued when the young minister came. 

But speaking this chapter of my history frankly, 
I was in love and determined to be, only with my 
business as a preacher. And for two years I at- 
tended strictly to that business. I soon found that 
my people possessed the sturdy traits of the best 
New England heritage. Very many of the mem- 
bers lived outside the town. That meant long 


68 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


drives to get to church. It also meant long drives 
for me to make my visits to them. But after all the 
parish work of the day was over I shut myself up 
in the little corner room of the hotel and wrote my 
sermons. For two years I wrote out at night every 
word of both sermons for morning and evening 
services, although later I abandoned that method 
for the notes and memory. 

My landlady, a motherly and thoughtful body, 
gave me free range of the hotel pantry at all hours. 
I would write on my sermon until midnight or one 
o'clock. Then I would begin to get hungry. The 
hotel was asleep. The town was dark. The quiet 
of the mountains and hills shut down about that 
corner of Main Street in the early hours with 
a stillness that I found very helpful to composition. 
But I would be so worked up over the sermon mak- 
ing that I found from experience I needed a little 
food before I could go to sleep. 

I would go down the broad hall of the old hotel, 
creep down the wide stairs, through the dining room 
and the kitchen and into the pantry where the shelves 
were filled with the most palatable apple pies, 
all made by the landlady herself from the choicest 
baldwins, and help myself to a piece of pie some- 
what bigger than the amount served on a Pullman 
diner, a slice of sage cheese and a pitcher of cold 
milk, and take them up to my room and have a 
feast. I then retired and slept healthily until seven 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 69 


o’clock. So far as I have been able to discover I 
have never suffered in any way from this habit of 
apple pie and cheese eaten at night, but I hope it is 
understood that I am not trying to lay down any 
rules for other people’s dietary. 

I had not been in Waterbury a month before I 
found that the regular and narrow round of amuse- 
ments for the young people revolved for the most 
part around dancing and card playing. ‘There was 
no reading room or library and little community 
life. ‘The two churches were rivals in a field where 
one church was enough for all the people. I am 
telling this story of my life with an honest attempt 
to tell things just as they were, and so I am going 
to confess that I entered into this church rivalry 
with all my might, which meant trying to get all the 
town to come and hear me preach, and making all 
the friends I could for the purpose of making the 
“Congo” church popular. Our organist married 
and moved to Montpelier, and I promptly secured 
the services of the Methodist organist by offering 
to pay her fifty cents a Sunday more than she was 
getting at the Methodist Church. This extra 
amount I paid out of my own salary. At the time I 
saw no impropriety in doing a thing like this, be- 
cause the Methodist minister employed the same 
tactics toward me. We were both political sec- 
tarians, each one eager to build up his own church at 
the expense of the other, and yet at the heart of my 


70 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


ministry during those two years, paradoxical as it 
may seem, I believe I had at the same time a sincere 
desire to preach Christ and honor his teaching. In 
the matter of denominational rivalry I simply fol- 
lowed the prevailing custom. As I look back at it, 
of course I revolt at the whole affair, but it illus- 
trated the absurdity and even wickedness of denom- 
inational life at its worst. 

Incidentally the first Reading Club which I or- 
ganized to get the young people interested in some- 
thing besides dancing and cards provoked the bitter 
criticism of the Methodist pastor, because the Club 
finally became so popular that all the young people 
including the Methodist group came into it, so that 
he charged me with wholesale proselyting of his 
flock. I may say that I never felt even then that I 
was guilty of doing anything unchristian in the for- 
mation of that club. I will confess my sin in taking 
away his organist but when it came to interesting 
the young people of the town, the field was as open 
to the other minister as to myself. He had not 
entered it, and I considered the matter wholly from 
the standpoint of general welfare for all the young 
folks regardless of their church connection. 

Out of this Reading Club grew a town Library. 
which I am pleased to say is flourishing today. It 
is one of the practical results of many experiments 
I made, some of which were experiments only, as 
I stumbled along sometimes getting up a little, and 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 71 


sometimes falling down in very humiliating fash- 
ion, because I was not wise enough to wait for re- 
sults. I could not prevail on the people to vote 
for free pews or the doing away with the old Par- 
ish system which allowed people not members of the 
church an equal vote in church affairs with those 
who had actually joined and were actually mem- 
bers. In other matters I learned after the first 
year to exercise patience and secure by persuasion 
what I could not effect by throwing a bomb Sunday 
morning from the pulpit into the pews. 

Among the trying experiences of that first winter 
in Waterbury were the extraordinary numbers of 
funerals I was called on to attend. I had over 
twenty-five between November and April. And 
most of them were cases of death of strong stocky 
young farmer boys from typhoid fever. ‘They did 
not know, and the doctors did not know that the real 
cause of this terrible mortality was in almost every 
instance farm wells near cesspools or the contamina- 
tion of barn yards and unsanitary conditions which 
existed generally on nearly every Vermont farm. 
I was accustomed that winter to hear ministers who | 
officiated at funerals like mine say in their sermons 
and their prayers that the dear departed had been 
visited by a divine providence. It took me two 
years to arrive at the facts and take on courage 
enough to tell the farmers living in those solitary 
hill farms that it was not divine providence that was 


72 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


making their boys sicken and die, but a very earthly 
pig pen too near the well. The first time I ven- 
tured to say that, I was nearly driven off the prem- 
ises, but the young doctor in town finally came to 
my side and between us we made some impression. 
But the second winter I had a score of deaths to 
attend that made my soul revolt at the slow and 
indifferent progress towards a disagreeable truth. 
But none of us knew then that the time would come 
when a typhoid patient would be almost as rare for 
the average doctor as a case of bubonic plague or 
cholera. 

Waterbury did not boast any hearse but had to 
hire one from Waitesfield or Montpelier. When we 
could not get a hearse from either place the coffin 
was put into a long box just enough larger in size 
than the casket to allow the latter to slide into 
the former. On one occasion on a very steep hill as 
I drove in my accustomed place in the funeral pro- 
cession directly behind the vehicle that conveyed the 
casket, I was horrified to see the rear door of this 
long box break from its hinges and the casket inside 
slipped out and fell on the ground in front of Pony 
Bly. I did not make any remarks out loud at the 
time, but afterwards I did, and the town bought 
a hearse instead of hiring one or using a makeshift. 

During these funeral experiences I soon found 
that the regular service expected by the family 
should consist of a long and exhaustive sermon in 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 73 


the church and a long eulogy also at the grave, even 
if the weather marked fifteen below zero and we 
had driven at a slow walk over the wind-swept hills 
for nine miles to the cemetery. The first time I 
ventured to keep my hat on at the grave I met the 
rebuke of my senior deacon and the strong disap- 
proval of the family, although the family had not 
been to church for years, did not belong to mine or 
any other and drove back to their farm without a 
word of thanks or an expression of gratitude al- 
though I had been out to their place, a distance of 
several miles, to see the deceased during his illness 
many times, spending days of travel going and com- 
ing, and on the last drive ruining a good suit of 
clothes in a terrible storm of rain when my buggy 
wheel came off and I had to soak around in the clay 
mud for hours trying to mend it. 

It is, of course, inexcusable for a minister to tell 
of things like these, and he does not do it as a rule, 
but perhaps once in a lifetime he may be allowed 
to emphasize the uncomfortable fact of the existence 
of a certain type of humans who exist in nearly 
every parish. During my two years in Waterbury 
I did not have many such experiences, but I had 
enough of them to make me wonder at the humanity 
that will take service from the church and give 
nothing back. But at any rate I was not too young | 
in the ministry to be able to think that after all the 
dependence of unchurched families on the church in 


74 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


times of trouble was a splendid compliment to the 
reputation of the church for helpfulness regardless 
of any thought of reward. 

I began to feel the need of a closer acquaintance 
with my people the second winter and asked them 
one Sunday morning from the pulpit if they would 
be willing to board me around a week at a time. I 
outlined my plan as follows: 

I was boarding and rooming at the hotel, and 
could regulate my movements with perfect independ- 
ence. I suggested that beginning with a Sunday I 
would go home with the family that would make me 
their guest for a week and take the midday meal 
with them directly after the morning service and 
visit with them at the table. I would then go back 
to the hotel and get ready for the evening meeting. 
After the evening meeting I would go home with the 
family and have another visit with all of them as 
long as they wished. Then beginning with Monday 
I would eat my breakfast at the hotel and go to the 
home and take dinner and supper and spend as much 
of the evening with the family as was desired or 
possible. The same program to be carried out for 
all the other days of the week, ending with Satur- 
day night. Beginning with the following Sunday I 
would go home with another family in the same way. 

I did not realize then and I have hardly come to 
know yet just what all that meant to busy house- 
wives, but I was naturally pleased at the time to find 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 75 


that my proposal to invite myself to free meals for a 
week met with such a welcome response that before 
the year was over I had carried out that program 
in forty families, and I believe the plan enabled me 
to become better acquainted with those families than 
I could have known them by any amount of casual 
“parish calls.” I hesitate to say how many chicken 
dinners I helped consume. Also I do not know to 
this day exactly what some of the church families 
really thought of the plan. All I know is that I 
enjoyed playing with the children in the family 
circle in the evenings, and had a glimpse of the home 
circle that I wonder at today. In many of them 
I helped to introduce family worship, and learned 
much valuable information from some of the best 
informed Vermont farmers who were included in 
my parish who took pride in showing me their 
butter-making and maple sugar devices. At least 
I like to think my ‘“‘boarding around” did not harm 
any one unless at times I felt overfed. During 
those weeks Mother Barrett, my landlady at the 
Main Street hotel, saved her apple pies and cheese, 
and if I remember correctly, she deducted my meals 
out from my weekly bill. 

The president of the Ladies’ Aid Society lived 
on the north side of Main Street. During the week 
that I “boarded around” with her she spoke nearly 
every day of the great annoyance she suffered from 
the clouds of south wind dust that sifted into her 


76 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


house from the Main Street which was not paved, 
and was thick with dust in a dry season. She was 
an immaculate housekeeper, and a speck of dust 
on her furniture was not only a sign of slovenly 
housekeeping but it was indexed in her mind almost 
as a sin. 

When I finished my week at her house, I began to 
think out a plan to sprinkle Main Street. Across 
the track of the Central Vermont Railroad and a 
quarter of a mile from the hotel, up on the high 
hillside was a large spring that I had discovered 
in my walks and climbs about the town, and it was 
on a tract of land that belonged to one of my 
church members. I first secured his consent to make 
whatever use of the spring that I wished as well 
as the use of an old barn of his that was down near 
the street. I bought several hundred feet of pipe 
and with the help of one of the older boys who was 
a member of the Reading Club we ran the pipe 
from the spring to the barn and into an old wooden 
tank in the hay loft. The tank was what was left of 
an old cider press outfit and I had it mended to hold 
a large amount of water. To my great delight I 
found that the pressure from the elevation of the 
spring would fill this tank full in a short time. 

My next task was to find anything like a water 
wagon. I finally secured another old cider tub of a 
large dimension and had it mounted on a lumber 
wagon, and then for a driver I hired an old man 


MY FIRST MINISTRY "7 


who was a village character, who had invested in a 
span of horses that I believe were even older than 
the driver. I forget what I paid him, but it did 
not take quite all my salary. We found the hard- 
ware and tinsmith man in town could make a rough 
but workable tin sprinkler that was fastened to the 
bottom of the cider tub after considerable trouble 
in adjusting it so that when the wagon turned around 
it would not collide with the trees that lined the 
whole length of Main Street. 

That was a proud but anxious day when the driver 
first filled the wagon tank from the barn tank and 
started his deliberate career up Main Street. ‘The 
town had been having some inkling of what was 
going on, but the actual advent of the sprinkler into 
the street brought every able-bodied person and 
some of the shut-ins to the door or window of every 
house. That old scarecrow on the wagon had a 
bigger audience than either the Methodist minister 
or myself had ever boasted. I stood on the upper 
porch of the hotel just outside my own window and 
I am willing to confess that the sight of that sprin- 
kler making its triumphal progress past the residence 
of the President of the Ladies’ Aid gave me greater 
satisfaction than most of the honorary degrees I 
have since received. The sprinkler made its regular 
trips up and down Main Street all summer, and 
people never seemed to get over the novelty of it. 
It made almost the same impression every time it 


“8 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


appeared as a circus parade in its one solitary annual 
appearance in a small country town. I had many 
troubles over the spring, which repeatedly went 
wrong in choking up the outlet pipe. I must have 
spent weeks all told in doing things to keep the 
sprinkler going. But the dust was laid, and I could 
get almost anything I wanted from the Ladies’ Aid 
Society during the remainder of my ministry in 
Waterbury. 

It was during this second summer that I began 
to discover that a large number of the old people 
in my parish were very deaf, and while many of 
them went to church from long habit they could not 
hear the sermon or enjoy the singing or any of the 
service. 

It seemed to me a pity that every Sunday twenty- 
five or thirty men and women in my congregation 
never heard a word of what I was saying, and could 
not take part in the responsive readings or the hymn 
singing. So I made arrangements with a printer in 
Montpelier to print one sermon every month. This 
printed sermon was ready to be distributed on a 
Sunday morning just before the service began. 
When the sermon was ready for delivery from the 
pulpit every person in the congregation had the 
printed form in his hand to follow. I found after 
trying this plan that it added to the pleasure of 
those who were unable to hear. The expense of the 
printing was met by a voluntary silver offering at 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 79 


the door as people went out. I was gratified also by 
the attention paid to the sermon when it was 
printed, by all the people, even those who were not 
deaf. But one of my friends who was a young law- 
yer studying with Governor William Dillingham, 
who afterwards became the famous Senator from 
Vermont, said, “It’s a great scheme of yours to keep 
the whole congregation from falling asleep by get- 
ting them to read the sermon while you are deliver- 
ing it. I suppose they follow you to see if you skip 
any of it or mispronounce any words.” 

This story of my ministry in Waterbury and after- 
wards in Kansas is not written to advocate any 
sermonic methods or plans or emphasize any par- 
ticular programs of church work. I am giving as 
near as I can the story of my own first attempts 
in the ministry which were made on the assumption 
that the work of a minister is in a very remarkable 
degree an undefined profession. A doctor has a 
pretty well-defined program. A lawyer knows to a 
large degree just what his work in life is going to 
be. A newspaper man has a well-defined outline. 
A banker moves in a well-described orbit. But a 
minister is dealing with life on every side. His 
day’s program is not hard and fast. His problems 
are not those of the average man. ‘The entire com- 
pass of human experience and human sin and human 
need and human regeneration is the stretch of the 
minister’s ever changing task. I have never believed 


80 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


that writing sermons and making calls and marrying 
people and burying them and delivering Commence- 
ment addresses spelled the main chapters in a min- 
ister’s life. There is something more. Even the 
great calling of preaching and teaching religious 
truth does not define the minister’s calling. There 
is more than that to it. Life on all sides, life abun- 
dantly is the minister’s business. Somehow it grew 
on me during those short two years there in the 
Green Mountains among those farm people and 
townspeople, as I met them on Main Street and in 
their homes and on Sundays that what I could do 
for them in between the Sundays, and what they had 
to teach me in between the preaching and teaching 
periods meant far more to them and to me than 
any professional service they paid me for or that I 
tried to earn. I have not made what I mean very 
clear, have I? But as we go on perhaps it will come 
out somewhere what I mean by the ministry as com- 
pared with other callings. — | 

I had always had a hope that sometime I might 
have a church of my own that had not had any pre- 
vious minister or history, something that I could 
shape and grow up with. So it happened that when 
at the close of my second year at Waterbury I re- 
ceived a call to become pastor of the Central Con- 
gregational Church in Topeka, Kansas, a church 
newly formed from the First Church, an organiza- 
tion of about sixty people, I felt as if my dream 





TOPEKA. 1889. 
BEGINNING OF MINISTRY IN 
CENTRAL CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. 





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MY FIRST MINISTRY 81 


was coming true, and instantly accepted the call, and 
began my ministry in Kansas in January of the 
year 1889. 

My first service with my new Parish began in a 
little room in the upper story of a meat market 
building. There was no pulpit and my first sermon 
I laid on the top of the little reed organ while the 
congregation sat around on chairs and benches. 
There was a stone foundation laid for a permanent 
church building a block away from the meat market 
but the building was not ready for use until June 
of that year. Meanwhile we enjoyed the ‘upper 
room” in which conversions took place and over 
forty men, women and children joined the church at 
the first communion. It is astonishingly true that 
the Spirit of God pays very little attention to the 
particular places in which men find Him. It would 
be interesting to know how many souls have been 
born again out of doors instead of in temples made 
with men’s hands. At any rate a little room over 
a meat market is not a poor place in which to find 
God and love him, especially when the souls who 
meet there are with one accord and are seeking after 
the Divine if happily they may find Him. 

The following winter was an unusually severe one 
and owing to industrial conditions prevailing all over 
the country thousands of men were out of work, and 
could not find anything to do. The thing lay on me 
like a monstrous burden that seemed more than I 


82 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


could bear. I believe that at that time in my ex- 
perience I felt, as I have often wished I could feel 
again with the same intensity, the horrible blunder 
and stupidity of our whole industrial system that 
does not work according to any well-established plan 
of a Brotherhood of men, but is driven by forces 
that revolve around some pagan rule of life called 
“supply and demand” or a “‘market”’ or a “condi- 
tion,’ rather than around a combined and intelli- 
gent effort of human beings who have a mutual in- 
terest in one another instead of a cunningly devised 
scheme to get something out of one another. 

‘I felt the isolation of the preacher and the minis- 

ter from the great world of labor. What did I 
know of it except the little experience I had had on 
a farm asa boy? It seemed to me that the church 
as an organization was so remote from the working 
masses that it could never hope to bring them in- 
side its fold. It was another world from the re- 
ligious and denominational world into which my 
people and I had been born and raised, and I re- 
sented it as an artificial barrier to any thought of a 
_ human brotherhood. 

Thinking it all over one snowy afternoon as I 
sat in my little room at Mother’s (I was still un- 
married and not giving a thought to anything except 
my preaching and parish work), I wondered what 
I could do to ease my own mental unrest. I finally 
hunted up the oldest suit of clothes I could find in 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 83 


the closet and after putting them on I told my 
mother that I was going out for the rest of the 
afternoon; I went out past the church and walked 
on down to the town’s business street and after 
reaching the lower end of the avenue near the river 
where I seldom went and where I would not be 
known I entered the first place of business that 
seemed to me to be favorable and asked the man 
behind a counter if he knew where I could find a 
job. He did not even look up from a paper he was 
reading. I spoke to him again and he simply stared 
at me, but did not answer my question. I think 
it was a retail feed store I had gone into. I stood 
my ground and finally the man said, with a snort, 
“Job! You tell me where I can get one, will you? 
There isn’t business to keep a hen busy.” As I 
started to go out he said, “If you find a job, let 
me know, will you?” 

I went out and into the next door, and asked the 
same question, and got about the same answer. 
I continued on going into every place of business on 
that side of the street, until I came to the river and 
crossed it and continued my search for a job over 
in what is known as North Topeka, where I had 
seldom gone in the short time I had been with my 
church and where the chance of my being known 
was very small. 

The places I went into represented every form 
of business from coal yards to flouring mills and ele- 


84 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


vators and shoe shops and restaurants and hotels 
and grocery stores and hardware and dry goods. I 
also tried several houses to ask if there was any 
work I might do around the house or barn. In all 
I must have applied at over forty different places 
asking for work, and there was no work to be had, 
of any sort. 

As night came on I had an uncanny feeling that 
the thing I was trying was somehow real, and I 
wondered what I would do if I could not find any 
work and where I would spend the night. Back in 
my mind I knew that although my walk had taken 
me about four miles from Mother’s I could get 
back there in time for a good warm supper and a 
comfortable bed and the luxury of a home. But as 
I turned back to cross the river again I still had a 
queer feeling that the world was a very cold and 
dreary place where a man who wanted to work and 
had the ability to do good work could not find any 
one who wanted his work. Late that night, after 
relating my experience to the folks, who, I should 
have said before this, had followed me to Kansas 
from the old Salem home, I went up to my little 
room and reflected on my day’s search for a job, and 
tried to put myself in the other man’s place, and 
then multiply him by several hundred thousand as 
they actually were that winter. I did not sleep 
soundly, but in the morning I started out again on 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 85 


the same quest, determined to spend the entire week 
hunting for work until I found it. 

For three days more I walked nearly all over the 
town asking for a job and failing to find any. At 
the end of the fourth day I had grown bolder in my 
attempts and ventured into the heart of the business 
district on the avenue, but my clothes were rusty 
and an old overcoat and a shapeless hat gave me 
more disguise than even I had supposed would be 
real. JI happened to meet only occasionally a 
parishioner and was not recognized so far as I know 
by any one. It occurred to me occasionally that per- 
haps the very looks of a man who presented more 
or less the appearance of a tramp was the reason for 
the short and hopeless answers I received, but in 
more than one place of business I was aware of 
fairly well-dressed men turning away from counters 
and coming out of offices rebuffed in their attempts 
to secure a job. 

It is not easy at this time to understand the con- 
ditions that prevailed during that bleak winter of 
1890. I doubt if any similar condition in the 
industrial world has been true since then. 

It was Friday afternoon when I found myself 
down on the Santa Fé tracks in the railroad yards. 
I had spent the week up to that time in a fruitless 
search for work. I think it is safe to say that there 
was hardly a business of any sort wholesale or retail 
in the whole town that I had not been into. Doc- 


86 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


tors’ offices, the two newspapers, the street car barns, 
drug stores, hotels, boarding houses, news stands, 
restaurants, everything except the theaters and the 
tobacco stores I had tried, and as the week was 
drawing to a close I began to have a hunger for 
work that I never used to feel out on the farm in 
Dakota. Every time I saw men at work anywhere 
at anything I envied them. ‘They have a job,” I 
kept saying: ‘‘Why can’t I get one?” The getting 
and holding of a job had come to seem to my think- 
ing the very apex of success in life. 

It had been snowing all the week and a gang of 
men was at work on the Santa Fe tracks in the yards 
shoveling the snow off the ties and clearing the 
switches. They looked to me like specially favored 
human beings, and I stopped near them and asked 
them what they were getting for their job of shovel- 
ing. They said the road paid them one seventy-five 
a day. It seemed to me a fabulous sum. I won- 
dered what I would do if I had that amount com- 
ing to me at the end of the day, and finally I asked 
one of the shovelers if they would object if I got a 
shovel and joined them. I said I wanted to get 
warm doing something. 

There was no objection that I heard, and I went 
over to a coal yard near by and borrowed a second 
hand shovel and joined the Santa Fé gang and 
shoveled snow the rest of the afternoon. I en- 
joyed the work as much as I have ever enjoyed any 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 87 


work in my life. It was work, and work was what 
I was hunting. Just to be in the company of human 
beings who were working and who had a job added 
to my self-respect which I had been losing for four 
days and a half because no one in the wide world 
needed me. 

It was getting dark when the men quit. I took 
my shovel back to the coal man and walked the two 
miles home through the storm, quite elated. I had 
at last found a job. To be sure the matter of pay 
was not taken into account, and in explaining my 
day’s experience I think I did not make it very plain 
to my mother and father and sisters just why I felt 
so well satisfied with the day’s outcome, but I felt 
quite a glow at the heart that I had at least been 
for four hours a part of the world’s labor. And 
I have ever since that Friday afternoon had a sort 
of feeling that the Santa Fé Railroad owes me 
eighty-seven and one-half cents for a half day’s 
work shoveling snow down in the yards, even if I 
was not on its pay roll. I worked harder that after- 
noon than any other member of the gang and 
shoveled more snow, and talked less and did not 
soldier on the job by stopping to light my pipe 
every time it went out. I have never put in any claim 
for this eighty-seven and a half cents, but morally 
the railroad owes it to me, because I really did 
work that much money’s worth. 

There was only one more day in the week in 


88 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


which to hunt for work and I went down Saturday 
morning early and applied to the man who had 
loaned me the shovel for a job. Something in his 
appearance when I took the shovel back made me 
think perhaps he might give me something to do. 
To my great delight he set me to work shoveling 
coal out of a carload into his coal yard bins. | 
reveled in that job. I worked so hard that I had 
the car empty before noon. I hoped there might be 
something more, but it was all. I ate a sandwich 
and drank a cup of coffee in a little box of a lunch 
place near the tracks paying for them out of the 
fifty cents the man paid me for the job, and carried 
home the balance of change, forty cents, which I 
put into the contribution box Sunday morning. 

In the evening I told my congregation about the 
week’s experience. They seemed really interested, 
so much so that I asked them if I might be allowed 
to carry out a plan I had been brooding over all 
the past week while hunting work. I outlined the 
plan to the congregation and found there was no 
outspoken opposition and beginning with the very 
next day I set to work to carry it out. 

I divided the whole town into eight groups of hu- 
mans as follows: Doctors, Lawyers, Business Men, 
Railroad Men, Street Car Men, College Students, 
Newspaper Men, and Negroes. There were several 
thousand of these latter, many of them living in a 
residence section of the city, just across the street 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 89 


from our church in what was known as Tennessee- 
town. 

My plan consisted in an attempt to live as nearly 
as I could for an entire week with each one of these 
groups as they would let me. In carrying out the 
program I went first to the President of the Medical 
Association in town and asked to be allowed to meet 
with the doctors at their weekly meeting, to visit 
the hospitals and be allowed to see operations, to 
ride out with the doctors on their regular visits to 
patients, to ask them all the questions about their 
work that I could think of and in short to learn all 
I could about a doctor’s life as far as possible. For 
my part I promised to do anything the doctors asked 
me to do except take their medicine. And I had a 
very busy and valuable week. 

The next week I moved over into the lawyers’ 
camp with the same general purpose. I attended 
court trials, read law all the week with a prominent 
judge in his office, went to a meeting of the Bar 
Association, heard cases between lawyers and clients, 
and pored over law journals every evening. 

With the Business Men’s group I visited all the 
principal stores, and interviewed the managers, in- 
vited special groups of them to lunch where we 
talked over business methods and problems, and in 
several instances was permitted to address groups 
of employees who came together by invitation from 
the employers. I do not think I got very far with 


90 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


anything that week. The subject was too large to 
absorb intelligently. 

My week with the Railroad Men was in some 
ways the most exciting and interesting of all. ‘wo 
nights I had permission from the Superintendent of 
the Division to ride on the switching engine at the 
yards. For the entire week I had a pass from the 
Superintendent which permitted me to ride on any 
train, passenger or freight, and on any engine on any 
train on the division coming into or going out of 
Topeka. This included all trains running as far as 
Kansas City to the east and Emporia to the west. 
I spent two exciting nights on a fast freight, riding 
in the caboose part of the time, in the engine part of 
the time and on top of the cars part of the time. 
Twice in jumping from one car to another when the 
train was in motion I nearly fell between the cars. 
It was before the days of the movies, but I still be- 
lieve that if the camera could have caught some of 
the frantic moves I made to clear the yawning gaps 
between the cars of that freight train rolling down 
the road to Bill White’s town, it would beat any- 
thing yet taken for the purpose of creating a thrill. 
In between these train rides I visited the big machine 
shops that are located at Topeka, and talked with 
all Railroad Men I met, asking them all sorts of 
questions about their work. 

Topeka at this time had the longest electric street 
car line in the Middle West. The Superintendent 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 91 


gave me leave to ride on all the cars at any hour of 
the day or night. I followed the same plan as in 
the railroad week riding with the men, talking to 
them whenever their duties would permit, and study- 
ing all the problems they mentioned, including their 
religious faiths, their housing conditions, wages and 
general home life as much of it as the men were 
willing to share with me. 

During the college week I attended the college 
recitations, took a course with the class in sociology, 
played indoor gymnasium games with the baseball 
team, and lived with the students and teachers in 
every way possible. My aim was to find out as much 
as I could of the religious life of the college and 
the general plan and purpose of the courses in edu- 
cation to get the teachers’ and students’ definition 
of it. 

The Topeka Daily Capital gave me a route as 
a reporter covering a wide range of territory and 
subjects. In between the reports I wrote of political 
and society events I spent all the time I could in 
the press room learning all I could about the recep- 
tion of A.P. news and its uses, as well as the me- 
chanical work of a daily. I had several conferences 
with the reporters and editors, and have no doubt 
I wore them out with questions and amused them 
with suggestions out of my ignorance. 3 

Tennesseetown, where about 1,000 Negroes lived 
in small cabins, proved to be so interesting a study 


92 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


that I extended my time and spent two weeks among 
the people there. After living over there and study- 
ing the needs of the people who had come up in an 
exodus from Tennessee to Kansas, it looked like a 
promising field for missionary and welfare work for 
my young people, and after making a careful survey 
of the district to find out the conditions that existed, 
the young people went over, and continued to work 
for several years in what was really foreign mission- 
ary ground. 

I want to stop right here for a few minutes to 
pay tribute to the young life in my Topeka parish. 
The story of my ministry would not be in any sense 
a good picture if the story of the young people 
who were a part of it all were not told. I owe more 
to them than I can every repay except with affec- 
tionate regard and esteem. For many years during 
the thirty-one years of a pastorate that was free 
from any shadow of dissension or division my young 
people worked at tasks that might and perhaps 
would have discouraged and appalled any group of 
grown up folks. They walked and ran into places 
where angels were hard to find. ‘Their very igno- 
rance of the problems involved over in ‘Tennessee- 
town made them immune to fear or defeat. In look- 
ing back over it Iam amazed at the perfect abandon 
with which they invaded that black territory and re- 
claimed it. The entire prospect was without hope 
of reward or success. But when once the picture 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 93 


of what might be done was clear to them they threw 
themselves into the adventure as eagerly and cour- 
ageously as any missionary force in any foreign 
land. 

The first thing they did was to hire a dance hall 
where the Negroes had been in the habit of spend- 
ing their social evening hours, and turned it into a 
reading room and library. It was an unfinished 
building and the young folks went over at night and 
lathed it and mended it and then raised the money 
for the plastering and painting. For several years 
this reading room and library served the interests of 
the community, the young folks taking their turns at 
_ the post of librarian evenings, many of them who 
were college students spending many nights in this 
task. 

Gradually other things grew out of the attempt to 
create a community spirit among the people in Ten- 
nesseetown. A Kindergarten was organized and it 
continued for over twenty years until it was taken 
over by the city school board. ‘Ten years after it 
was started it sent an exhibit of its work to the 
Jamestown Exposition and later to the St. Louis 
Exposition and in both cases carried off the silver 
medal for the best exhibit over every other kinder- 
garten display made by any other schools white or 
colored. The children who composed the first 
gathering of these Negroes into the first Kinder- 
garten for Negroes west of the Mississippi are now 


94 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


grown and have children of their own, and many 
of them are living in comfortable modern houses, 
they drive good automobiles for which they have 
paid the price, they live on land that once was cov- 
ered with shacks, they have responsible positions as 
lawyers and doctors and public officials and are 
among the substantial citizens of the state. For 
the carrying on of all this work the young people 
helped to raise the money, and they took an active 
part in personal work, which after all lay at the 
heart of the most valuable contribution they made 
to the real redemption of ‘Tennesseetown. 

There was much vacant land about the cabins 
and in the neighborhood and it was not being used 
for gardens or flowers. We organized a Commun- 
ity Garden society and offered prizes for the best 
garden on a man’s lot, and more than twenty-five 
prizes were given for the best-looking home, inside 
and out, adding prizes for the best display of cook- 
ing and sewing and flower exhibit. This led to an 
annual meeting in the hall where the kindergarten 
was held, and the prizes, in the form of garden uten- 
sils, household furnishings and books were distrib- - 
uted to a crowd that literally darkened the doors 
and windows and roosted all over every vantage 
point where the view of the proceedings could be 
seen. 

Later the young folks added a creche for working 
mothers, and basket weaving and sewing classes 


MY FIRST MINISTRY 95 


and other manual labor for which the workers re- 
ceived market prices. But the two things that con- 
tinued longest for permanent influence were the 
kindergarten and the library, supplemented by Sun- 
day meetings where the young people of my En- 
deavor Society would pick up their chairs and go 
over Sunday nights in a body and hold a model 
Christian Society religious service, the Negro popu- 
lation, as many as could get into the hall, sitting 
in reverent attention and joining with their untrained 
but God-given voices in the Gospel hymns sung by 
all. I have often thought that in the singing of 
those songs where the black and white unison rose 
together in the heart of that American Africa, my 
young people, without quite knowing how, came to 
feel the oneness of the human family more deeply 
than in all the work they did for the welfare of 
those brothers and sisters of ours of another color 
but of the same blood in the great Creator’s design 
of the human family. 

It was during the fall of the next year that I 
began to be troubled over the ‘problem’ of the 
Sunday evening service. The working of it out led 
to the writing of ‘In His Steps” and other stories. 
It all seems as strange to me as to any one else, 
and in the telling of it, most of it never before 
related or published, I am hoping that those who 
read this story of my life will forgive what might 
seem at times like a personal boastfulness or unfor- 


96 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


givable egotism. In order to avoid anything like 
that, I am going to tell the story of ‘In His Steps” 
as if it had no connection with the author at all, 
standing outside the narrative and looking in with 
the readers at a chapter in life which came out of a 
chapter of fiction in which it seems as if the Divine 
Power took a very weak bit of human composition 
and molded it into his own gracious purpose. 


CHAPTER FOUR 
THE STORY OF “IN HIS STEPS” 
The story, “In His Steps, or What Would Jesus 


Do?” was first written by the author in the summer 
and fall of the year 1896 in Topeka, Kansas. Most 
of it was written out of doors on the author’s porch, 
where the intense summer Kansas heat registered 
over one hundred degrees nearly every day for sev- 
eral weeks. 

While it was being written it was also being read 
at the Sunday evening services, chapter by chapter, 
in the Central Congregational Church. The congre- 
gation was composed for the most part of young 
people, members of the Christian Endeavor Society, 
and college students at Washburn College. 

Late in the fall of that year while the reading was 
going on, the Chicago Advance, a small church 
paper, asked for the story to be printed as a serial, 
and finally purchased the serial rights for $75. 
When the reading was finished, friends asked for a 
book publication and the author took the manu- 
script to Chicago and offered it to three different 
publishers all of whom rejected it, giving as the 
reason the strong religious character of the story 

97 


98 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


which they said would make it a failure on the book 
market. 

The manuscript therefore went back to the dd- 
vance publishers who were asked to put out a ten 
cent paper covered volume for the first edition. 
The Advance people had never printed a book of 
any sort and were not in the book publishing busi- 
ness, but they finally agreed to run the risk, and 
while the story was still running in the paper they 
issued a small edition of a few hundred copies, 
taking out what they supposed was a regular copy- 
right from the authorities in Washington, and put- 
ting the copyright line on the first book that came off 
the press. 

Then a very peculiar thing happened which after- 
ward became an integral part of the book’s history. 
The publisher of the Advance sent only a part in- 
stead of all the chapters of the serial publication to 
the Washington Copyright Bureau, instead of all 
as the law required. On account of that slight tech- 
nical error the book copyright was declared de- 
fective although the Copyright Bureau issued a 
copyright certificate to the publisher for the first 
book that came off the press. 

Before the defect was discovered by certain book 
publishers who are on the lookout for such defects, 
the Advance had printed and sold over 100,000 of 
the ten cent paper bound volumes, and the demand 
was increasing. That was in June of 1897. By 


THE STORY OF “IN HIS STEPS” 99 


mid-summer sixteen different publishers in the 
United States had taken advantage of the defect 
in the copyright and were publishing the book in a 
large variety of editions. One firm in New York 
bought several hundred of the paper books from the 
Advance and put cloth covers on them, selling them 
for twenty-five cents, and also bought unbound 
sheets and made fifty cent books out of them. This 
firm alone put out over 100,000 of these cheaper 
books before it began to make its own plates and 
sell directly from its own bindery. 

From figures of publishing firms sent the author 
within the last five years by a number of the pub- 
lishers who issued ‘“‘In His Steps” all the way from 
twenty-five cents to two dollars a copy, it seems like 
a fair estimate to make, not counting the sales of 
publishers who have refused to tell how many copies 
they have made, that over 8,000,000 copies of “In 
His Steps” have been printed and read in America 
up to the present time. At this point it seems al- 
most necessary for the author to ask the reader to 
pardon him for what must seem to be an unforgiv- 
able egotism in the narration of the sales of the 
book. But he has no more a feeling of that sort 
than the reader has. It is simply a matter of his- 
tory in the story of books, and it is just as surprising 
to the author as it can be to any one, for he recalls 
one day in June getting a telegram from the dd- 
vance saying they had sold ten thousand copies, and 


100 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


he remembers saying to his wife, ““Wouldn’t it be 
wonderful if the story went up to 15,000 copies?” 

Meanwhile the English publishers were putting 
out the book in even greater variety and volume 
than in America. The book was in the “public 
domain,”’ that is anyone’s property. The author 
had no more legal ownership in it than if he had 
never written it or thought of it. ‘Thirty different 
publishers in Great Britain issued the book all the 
way from paper penny editions running up into three 
millions of copies to elaborate illustrated holiday 
editions costing eight and a half shillings. The 
author had the pleasure one day in London of buy- 
ing from a seller on the Strand a penny copy which 
had printed on the front, “This is the nine hundred 
and seventy-first thousandth copy.” 

A bewildering controversy arose over the teach- 
ing of the book. Hundreds of pulpits took it up 
and sermons were preached all over Great Britain 
denouncing the attempt to do as Jesus would do, 
or advocating it. Religious journals like the Brit- 
ish Weekly week after week argued the theological 
soundness or unsoundness of the principles of the 
human conduct based on such an attempt to follow 
Jesus. Several expurgated editions were published 
correcting the author’s faulty theology by inserting 
the orthodox teaching of Christ. One of these, 
which the author cherishes as a literary curiosity, is 
entitled ‘“The Rescue of Loreen,” and it is inter- 


THE STORY OF “IN HIS STEPS” 101 


spersed with conversations and preaching intended 
to counteract the very dangerous influence of the or- 
iginal story. The compiler of this interesting 
amended edition was a Mrs. J. B. Horton. Her 
pamphlet sold by the thousand alongside the original 
“In His Steps,” and was read by the extreme con- 
servatives as an antidote to the first story. 

One enterprising storekeeper in Glasgow had a 
special edition of “In His Steps” printed and put the 
name of his store as an advertisement on the bottom 
of every page of the book. One minister in a non- 
conformist chapel wrote the author that he had 
bought and given away a copy to every member of 
his church, some eight hundred in all, and hundreds 
of church members in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Can- 
ada, Australia, and New Zealand wrote saying they 
had done the same thing, making Christmas gifts 
to entire church memberships. The amount of cor- 
respondence that grew out of all this is almost un- 
believable. ‘The author is reluctant to even hint at 
the remarkable number and character of the letters 
that came and are still coming to him from all over 
the world. 

Again he would ask for the kindly judgment of 
the readers of this history. ‘The entire matter is 
as astonishing to him as to any one. He could have 
no anticipation or preparation for such an interest 
in his simple story everywhere. It came to him at 
the time and still comes with the same sense of 


102 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


wonderment that people all over the world of almost 
every tongue and tribe seemed to understand and 
respond to the thing that had been written with 
fear and trembling and without thought of any 
wider audience than the little friendly group of 
young folks that faced him in the little church those 
Sunday evenings when he first read it for them and 
as he supposed for them alone. 

Altogether the combined sales of these thirty pub- 
lishers in Great Britain amounted, it is estimated, 
to over 10,000,000 copies. Added to those sales 
must be the output of the book publishers in Canada, 
Australia, New Zealand, and other British posses- 
sions, bringing the combined sales under the British 
flag up to 12,000,000. These figures are also based, 
as are those of the sales in the United States, on 
publishers’ estimates furnished the author at his 
request. 

Another embarrassment which the author is re- 
luctant to mention but which is a part of the book’s 
history, is the fact that after the book began to be 
sold everywhere he was overwhelmed by letters 
from persons and organizations asking for financial 
help. 

The writers took for granted, and they were not 
to blame for it, that a book which was selling up 
into the tens of millions must have netted the author 
a fortune in royalties. Therefore, as hundreds of 
the letters insisted, the author who had profited to 


THE STORY OF “IN HIS STEPS” 103 


such an enormous extent and was rich, ought to live 
up to the teachings of his book and share with the 
poor and unfortunate, with churches, and strug- 
gling authors, and cripples, and farmers in debt; 
lift mortgages, help pay off obligations incurred by 
persons who had lost the savings of a lifetime by 
bad investments, and especially help the missionary 
enterprises of the world to spread the Gospel. 

The author of ‘‘In His Steps” has often wondered 
what would be the result of printing: the thousands 
of letters he has received during the last twenty-five 
years asking and demanding that he share his en- 
ormous fortune with others. One week he had over 
nine hundred letters. If there is a church denomina- 
tion or charitable institution in the United States 
that has not asked him for a contribution to its 
worthy cause he would like to know how it happened 
to omit the opportunity. Most of the letters began 
or closed the appeal for financial help by saying, 
“Brother, take it to your heart, what would Jesus 
do? Surely you cannot imagine Him clinging to the 
wealth you have received from your book. He 
would surely share it with others who are in need. 
You cannot imagine him refusing my request. What 
would Jesus do?” 

And, indeed, that is what the author has been ask- 
ing himself for about twenty-five years, meditating 
upon the fact that no doubt thousands of letter 
writers, to whom no reply could be sent explaining 


104 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


the matter, are probably at this moment reflecting 
upon the heartlessness of a rich author to share as 
Jesus would with the needs of the poor and un- 
fortunate, and wondering if Brother Sheldon will 
ever get into heaven by the needle’s eye route. 

For as a matter of fact he has never received one 
dollar from the more than 22,000,000 of copies of 
‘In His Steps’ printed and sold by more than fifty 
different publishers all over the world, on account 
of the defective copyright which threw the book into 
the public domain and took from the author every 
right he had in the work of his own brain and heart. 
There are two exceptions which must be noted. 
Mr. Bowden of the Bowden Publishing firm of 
London, who put out the penny paper editions of the 
book, sent him twenty pounds, or about one hundred 
dollars, after he had sold several million copies | 
not only of “In His Steps” but also of four other of 
the author’s books which had no international copy- 
right. And twenty-seven years after the first pub- 
lication of the book the firm of Grosset and Dun- 
lap, New York, gave him a check for $1,000 not 
because they were under any legal compulsion to do 
so, but of their own accord, allowing him one cent a 
copy on sales as shown by their books, of 100,000 
copies. 

The Advance Publishing Company paid the 
author ten per cent royalty on all sales as long as 
they continued in the business, but their sales were 





¢ d 


WHERE “IN HIS STEPS”? WAS WRITTEN. PORCH 
OF AUTHOR’S HOME, TOPEKA, KANSAS, 1896. 


es Z $i EB ERTES 
veg Hs BEETS : 





THE AUTHOR AND 36 DIFFERENT EDITIONS OF 
“IN HIS STEPS” 





“IN HIS STEPS’ TRANSLATIONS. 





<r 


25 SEPARATE EDITIONS “IN HIS STEPS” 


THE STORY OF “IN HIS STEPS” 105 


very few compared with those of the sixteen pub- 
lishers who paid no royalty in this country, and the 
thirty publishers in Great Britain. 

If these facts ever meet the eye of the any of the 
great multitude who have in the past asked the 
author to share his great wealth with them, or the 
eye of any who are even now in the present still 
writing letters of pitiful appeal, it may help to 
absolve the author from being a hard-fisted and 
unchristian capitalist who worships Mammon and 
does not live up to the motto of his own writings. 

After ‘“‘In His Steps” had been in print in the Eng- 
lish language for about two years, requests came in 
for the right to translate into other languages. The 
author had no right to anything, so all he could do 
was to tell the translators to go ahead and make the 
best translation they could, and he would count it a 
privilege if the translator would show the author 
the courtesy of sending him a copy of the transla- 
tion when it was completed. 

This courtesy was generally shown and the num- 
ber of translations in the author’s library comprise 
the following: 

French; German; Italian; Spanish; Dutch; Nor- 
wegian; Swedish; Danish; Russian; Turkish; Greek; 
Welsh; Gaelic; Bulgarian; Hungarian; Japanese; 
Persian; a dialect in Hindu; Esperanto and Armen- 
lan. 

The letters received from the translators are 


106 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


among the most cherished possessions of the author. 
The Japanese translator, the editor of a paper in 
Tokio, wrote asking for the privilege of translation,. 
and closed his letter by saying, “‘I have already done 
so, and am sending you a copy.” In a later letter 
he said, “I am looking out of my window and see 
two carpenters sawing on a timber; each one of them 
is holding a copy of your book in one hand and read- 
ing while he saws.” The Persian translator taught 
his college classes in a Presbyterian mission to read 
English from the book, using it as a text book for 
several years. When the Turks invaded Urumia 
they burned every copy. The translator of the Rus- 
sian edition was obliged to hide all the copies in a 
cellar during the revolution. ‘They were afterwards 
discovered by a Russian missionary and at risk of 
imprisonment he smuggled many of them over into 
Poland, and afterwards when he escaped to Amer- 
ica he used the book as a school text book in his 
Russian school in this country. The translator of 
the Turkish or Aramaic version writes in the copy 
he finally managed to get to the author: “This 
translation has taken six years after untold diffi- 
culties with the Turkish censors. Every reference 
to human freedom, brotherhood, the emancipation 
of woman or the cruelty of war had to be blotted 
out.” ‘he author cannot read Turkish, and he 
wonders what could have been left in the translation 
after the censor had done his deadly work. The 


THE STORY OF “IN HIS STEPS” 107 


Swedish translator writes, ‘““The reading of your 
story in our church has lead to a most blessed re- 
vival which is now in progress mightily.” The 
‘Spanish translation put out by the Methodist pub- 
lisher in Mexico was used in the regular Mission 
classes with results which the missionary says were 
most remarkable. The Welsh translation led to 
results which preceded the revival in that country 
in 1898, so the author’s correspondence says. The 
volume of letters is too large to quote at length. 
But for all and any influence the book may have had, 
all the praise and wonder of it belongs to Him who 
alone among the sons of men is King of kings and 
Lord of lords. 

Some recent facts about the story may be of in- 
terest to the reader. About ten years ago a film 
company in New York asked for the story for the 
purpose of putting it on the screen, and a contract 
was drawn up. Five years passed by and nothing 
was done with the production. After a good deal 
of technical trouble the contract was released to 
another New York Company but just as it was 
ready to go on with production, a representative of 
the Chicago Advance came forward to make a claim 
on the right to make a motion picture, owing to the 
original publication of the book. 

The reader would not be interested in the de- 
tails of this affair, which to the author’s mind is one 
of the strangest in the history of technicalities. But 


108 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


the result of much correspondence and personal 
meeting over the entire matter was the payment of 
a large sum by the author to the Advance represen- 
tative for his relinquishment of his rights to the film 
production, although there was no such thing as a 
motion picture in existence when the book was first 
published. The technicality of the defective orig- 
inal copyright, however, has followed the book into 
every phase of its use, either dramatic or musical. 
In the latter form it has been published as an Eng- 
lish Church service but a dispute has come up over 
the use of that in Great Britain. 

The New York Film Company now believed the 
way was clear for a film production, even if the title 
might be under a cloud, and believing that the com- 
mon sense of fairness in the theatrical world would 
discourage any duplicate films, they secured stock- 
holders with that understanding, and were about to 
proceed with the actual film making when the New 
York Edison Company came forward preferring a 
prior claim to the story because of a purchase they 
had made from a London playright of a dramatic 
version of another of the author’s books, ‘“The 
Crucifixion of Philip Strong,” into which the play- 
wright had put two or three characters from “In 
His Steps.”” The Edison Company made a film out 
of the play. The film did not resemble either of the 
author’s stories, but the Edison Company insisted 
on what it claimed was a legal ownership in “‘In His 


THE STORY OF “IN HIS STEPS” 109 


Steps,”’ and the result was, in order to avoid a long 
and expensive suit at law, the company interested in 
making a picture of “In His Steps” paid the Edison 
people a large sum to prevent their holding up the 
production indefinitely. 

By this time the investors in the picture had be- 
come nervous about the whole affair, and unwilling 
to put their money into something that might lead 
to failure. So the money was all returned, and the 
attempt to put the story into the picture abandoned. 
At this writing, 1925, there seems to be no prob- 
ability that the story will be made into a picture. 
The author has had a dream for years of a picture 
that might, under the power of the same gracious in- 
fluence that has used the book, take this wonderful 
method to touch the heart, and lead to an evangel 
that under wise leadership in the church and in all 
parts of the world might bring the Master again 
into the daily life of men as the One among all 
others to follow and love. But it seems it is not 
to be. Or at least, if it is done, it must be, not by 
money invested for financial returns but as a philan- 
thropic act. 

There is one more interesting fact connected with 
the recent book publication that enters into the his- 
tory of the story. A New York publisher who has 
begun to make a most interesting experiment in 
book making has within the last year put out 
enormous quantities of cloth-covered ten cent 


110 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


books, printing them in a little town in Tennessee. 
These ten cent books are of the non-copyright or 
defective class. ‘‘In His Steps” is one of twenty or 
more such titles. It is being printed unabridged 
and in an astonishingly attractive form and sold for 
ten cents. ‘The publisher has written the author 
that up to date over 150,000 copies have been 
printed and sold and editions are still coming off 
the press. It would be very interesting to know who 
is reading it now after twenty-seven years from the 
time the first ten cent paper bound book came off 
the press. 

It would be a very ungracious thing to close this 
little outline of the strange history of a book, and 
leave the impression on the reader’s mind or heart 
that the author retains in his spirit any feeling of 
regret or resentment towards any one or any organi- 
zation on account of the technicalities that have 
made him a looker on instead of the owner of a 
piece of property which others have controlled for 
their own gain. If the book had had a clear title 
the probability is that it would have had a small 
audience. The very fact that over fifty different 
publishers put the book out gave it a wide reading, 
and established its public as no one publisher could 
possibly have done. 

The only regret the author has perhaps felt as the 
years have gone on has been his helplessness to 
minister to the pitiful needs of those who have held 


THE STORY OF “IN HIS STEPS” 111 


up beseeching hands to him for help. There have 
been times when this world appeal has seemed more 
than the author could bear. He has also a natural 
longing that he might create and send out into the 
world in another form to appeal to the eye of a new 
generation the lesson of the story as the good God 
used it on the printed page. But he does not have 
the financial means to produce it. 

Aside from these reflections he is profoundly 
grateful for all the apparent help the story has been 
to many souls whose letters are too precious and 
sacred to show to others. These are among the 
riches he would not exchange for all the wealth of 
the richest monied princes of the earth. If the 
book has been read by millions whom he will never 
know or see in this world he cherishes the hope and 
lingers over the joy he may sometime experience in 
that other land where money will not be spoken of, 
that he may meet those who have received a bless- 
ing from the little book here. If that alone is not 
enough to remove every trace of envy or bitterness 
over the financial loss, he does not know what would 
do it. 


CHAPTER FIVE 
THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 


At the close of the year 1899 the famous Twen- 
tieth Kansas Regiment which made a record in the 
Philippines during the Spanish war was being re- 
viewed on the Topeka State House grounds, and the 
whole city was out to see it. With a number of 
friends I happened to be watching the event from 
the home of the owner of the Topeka Daily Capital. 
After the review was over and people had begun to 
go away, the conversation turned in some way which 
I cannot remember to that part of the story “In His 
Steps” in which there is a description of the attempt 
of a newspaper man to do everything as he believed 
Jesus would do it in the management of a daily 
paper. ) 

It was the general opinion expressed by the friends 
who were discussing the subject that any such at- 
tempt was so visionary that it could not be carried 
out in actual practice. One or two thought it might 
be possible to carry it out up to a certain point but 
in any case believed people were not ready for it 
and that whoever tried it would not be able to make 
it pay financially. 


II2 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 113 


As the discussion went on, every one present grew 
more and more interested until the proprietor of the 
Capital said to me in what I supposed was merely 
jesting query, ‘“How would you like to try the ex- 
periment with the Capital? For one week?” 

I answered him in the same way by saying it 
sounded interesting, but that was all. 

In reply he said he was in earnest, and went on 
to state the terms under which the Topeka Daily 
Capital might be turned over to me for one week to 
carry out my idea of what a Christian Daily ought 
to be. 

These terms as finally discussed and practically 
carried out included these general agreements: 

The entire paper for one week to be under my di- 
rection with the understanding that nothing would 
be done to jeopardize the property or the future of 
the paper. 

The entire working force to remain intact, includ- 
ing the mechanical, reportorial, and office force. 

Advertising rates to remain unchanged, but 
weekly rates for out of town and foreign subscrip- 
tions to be 25 cents instead of ten cents which was 
the regular city and local rate. This was to cover 
outside expenses and foreign postage. 

The editor’s rulings to be accepted in every de- 
partment. This covered such items as smoking and 
swearing. 

‘“‘News”’ was defined as any event worth knowing 


114 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


or telling published in the right proportion to its 
importance. 

All prize fights, scandals, crime, vice, or human 
depravity, if printed, to be defined as evil, and an 
attempt made in each case to discover and name the 
cause and the remedy. 

All editorials to be signed by the writers, and all 
reporters’ items to be signed in order to ensure re- 
liability, reward good reporting and fix responsi- 
bility. 

The editor to receive no financial compensation. 

The rule to govern all the management of the 
paper including its political, social, and financial in- 
terests was to be determined as nearly as it could be 
determined by the standard of what Jesus would 
probably do if He were publishing the paper on the 
basis of his ownership of it. 

The time set for the beginning of the experiment 
was the second week in March, 1900. 

Before that date and following the published an- 
nouncement of the plan, clubs were organized all 
over the country, by churches, Endeavor Societies 
and Epworth Leagues and various religious and 
social organizations, and subscriptions sent in by the 
thousand. One church in Ohio sent in a subscription 
list of 920 names. Subscriptions came from all over 
Great Britain, from nearly every South American 
Republic, from Australia and New Zealand and from 
Canada. A personal subscription came from Paul 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 115 


Kruger, the head of the Boer republic. ‘The Boer 
war was going on at the time, but old Oom Paul 
seemed interested in the plan, at least enough to 
send on his twenty-five cents for a copy of the paper. 
In one day’s mail I received subscriptions sent to me 
personally of over 1200 letters, and soon discovered 
that I needed secretarial help. Before the month 
of January, 1900, was over, the force in the Capital 
office had been increased to more than 40 persons, 
and the mail clerks at the general post-office had 
been increased by the addition of six new carriers 
and office men. On Monday morning one week be- 
fore the experiment on the paper began, the office 
of the Capital received in the first mail delivered, 
100,000 subscriptions which came from all the 
United States and Canada. The final number of 
subscriptions reached the number of 367,000 and 
that many copies of the daily were published every 
day for six days including a Saturday afternoon 
edition which took the place of the regular Sunday 
morning paper. 

The business end of the paper was taken care of 
by others and the account which follows is made up 
of data furnished by Mr. Dell Keizer, Business 
Manager, who faced for the first time some of the 
most unusual problems in journalism, and worked 
them out, it has always seemed to me, in a marvel- 
ous manner. 

In view of the fact that it is more than 24 years 


116 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


since the “‘Sheldon Edition” of the Capital was pub- 
lished, and to the further fact that the records of 
its publication are not now available to me, I may 
not be able to furnish you as detailed an account of 
its affairs as you need, but to the extent that it is 
possible I shall be very greatly pleased to respond 
to your request for information. 

You will remember that we were obliged to decide 
at the start that the paper would have to be con- 
fined each issue to 8 pages. This was necessary for 
two reasons. The first was the utter impossibility 
for any one man to consider and pass on all the mat- 
ter required to fill a larger paper, much less to do 
that and furnish as much original copy as you were 
of necessity obliged to do in that publication. The 
fact had to be recognized that without the aid of a 
staff trained to carry out your plans and theories 
governing this unusual newspaper you would 
have to be the “court of last resort’? passing on 
nearly everything that went into the edition, and of 
course there was a limit to human capacity. The 
second reason for deciding on an 8 page paper was 
the mechanical difficulties which confronted us in the 
printing and handling of such a suddenly inflated 
circulation within the limits of a newspaper plant 
in a city the size of Topeka. At the time, the 
normal circulation of the Capital averaged approxi- 
mately 15,000 copies daily and the reserve capacity 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 117 


of its plant made it possible to handle comfortably 
an edition of 25,000 copies. But that was a very 
meager beginning for the equipment required to 
handle the subscription list which finally accumulated 
from all quarters of the globe. 

From the very start it was apparent we were 
about to experience a deluge in the way of subscrip- 
tions. ‘They came to us from individuals, from 
newspapers making club offers to their readers, 
from church workers and societies of every kind and 
character. To the latter such as Epworth League 
Societies, Christian Endeavor, Y. M.C.A., Y. W. 
C. A. and kindred organizations we made a proposi- 
tion which enabled them to earn 10 cents on each 
subscription obtained for the use of their own organ- 
ization. ‘This resulted in countless club lists repre- 
senting almost every church in the United States. 

The average circulation of the “Sheldon Edition” 
of the Capital for the six days it was published 
reached the very remarkable figure of 360,000 cop- 
ies. Every subscriber to the paper received the copy 
they had paid for, and, despite the difficulties under 
which it was printed, in a reasonably prompt time 
after its issue. “There was much speculation on the 
part of the newspaper fraternity all over the coun- 
try as to how such a circulation could be printed and 
handled under the circumstances. ‘The writer re- 
ceived countless inquiries and suggestions concern- 


118 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


ing it from newspaper friends in all quarters. The 
first great difficulty to overcome was the press work 
and here is the way that was provided for: An 
arrangement was made with the Staats Zeitung in 
New York City to print 120,000 copies daily. A 
like arrangement was made with the Chicago Jour- 
nal to print 120,000 copies daily. It was decided 
that the remainder of the issue, which proved to be 
120,000 copies daily, could be printed at Topeka 
by using an extra force and running the big straight 
line Goss press of the Capital nearly all day. Four 
sets of matrices or molds for each page of the paper 
were made daily by Capital stereotypers. One set 
was used for casting the plates for the Topeka run 
of the paper. One set was dispatched each morn- 
ing at 4 o'clock for Chicago. These plates were 
cast by the Chicago Journal force and printed on 
the presses of that paper. The Capital was sold 
on the streets of Chicago on the day after it was 
issued in Topeka. A like set of matrices was dis- 
patched from Topeka together with the Chicago set. 
It was received in New York by the Staats Zeitung 
and reproduced by that paper, and the Capital was 
sold on Broadway and Wall Streets as a morning 
paper two days after it had appeared in Topeka. 
The fourth set of matrices was shipped to the West- 
minster Review of London and there reproduced and 
issued as soon as received. 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 119 


THE MAILING PROBLEM 


The press work of the “Sheldon Edition” of the 
Capital was a problem, but it was nothing compared 
with the difficulty of mailing the paper. Ordinarily 
the number of copies of a daily newspaper sent to 
subscribers in a single wrapper is less than 5 per 
cent of the edition. In the case of the ‘Sheldon 
Capital” more than 200,000 copies had to be mailed 
in that way. Twenty-four years ago the one depart- 
ment of a daily newspaper which had made little or 
no progress or improvement in methods was the 
mailing department. At that time the one stand-by 
of the mailing room was the hand operated machine 
known as the “Dick” mailer. It is used to clip 
and paste on to the paper the little yellow slip, 
familiar to every one, which contains the subscriber’s 
name. ‘The names of subscribers are set up in type 
and arranged in type galleys about the width of a 
newspaper column. From these proofs are made 
and run through the mailing machine. Of course 
the task of setting up in type such a mailing list as 
that of the ‘Sheldon Capital” was out of the ques- 
tion. ‘The alternative was a very large force of 
typists who made lists of the names in column form, 
six copies of each, one for each day’s paper. These 
lists were all arranged by States and sections and 
expressed to Chicago and New York for use of the 

Journal and Staats Zeitung in mailing the papers 


120 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


which they printed for their respective plants. All 
the copies of the paper for subscribers east of Pitts- 
burgh in a north and south line and in foreign lands, 
were dispatched from New York. All the copies 
of the paper for subscribers between the Alleghenies 
and the Missouri River were dispatched from Chi- 
cago. Topeka took care of all the local subscribers 
and those west of the Missouri River clear to the 
Pacific Coast. Lack of post-office facilities in To- 
peka for handling so large an edition was over- 
come by the Superintendent of the Railway Mail 
Service for Kansas, at that time the Hon. Clyde 
Reed who has since taken a very active part in the 
affairs of Kansas as a public officer. Mr. Reed cre- 
ated a post-office out of a large Railway Mail Car, 
and that, together with the Capital’s own mailing 
and dispatching facilities, made it possible to handle 
the edition each day without confusion or delay. 


ADVERTISING 


Because of the limited size of the “Sheldon Cap- 
ital” and its tremendously inflated circulation, an 
adjustment of its advertising rates and regulations 
became a necessity. With the codperation and con- 
sent of its regular local advertisers all the Capital’s 
advertising contracts with Topeka patrons were sus- 
pended for that week. Advertising rates for space 
in the paper were fixed at a very low rate per agate 
line per thousand copies of the paper printed each 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 121 


issue, the total charge for each advertisement be- 
ing determined by the exact number of copies of the 
paper sold and circulated in which the advertisement 
appeared. Each advertiser was furnished with the 
invoice rendered him, a statement of circulation 
guaranteed to be true and correct, by Dr. Sheldon’s 
personal assurance of its accuracy, based on indis- 
putable evidence and records furnished him by the 
Business Manager. The value of the “Sheldon Cap- 
ital” as an advertising medium was promptly rec- 
ognized by general advertisers of every kind and 
character. Advertisements began to reach the office 
of publication in great volume long before the time 
of issue. Herbert S. Houston was appointed Rep- 
resentative of the “‘Foreign’”’ Advertising field and 
through his very capable and successful efforts con- 
tracts were obtained for place in the ‘Sheldon Cap- 
ital” sufficient to have filled the available space many 
times over. Not the least of Dr. Sheldon’s tasks 
in the publication of the “Sheldon Capital’ was the 
scrutiny and censorship of the advertising copy sub- 
mitted for its columns. A rigid adherence to the 
principles governing the editorial and news columns 
of the paper made it necessary to reject nearly as 
much advertising matter as was finally accepted. 
While the writer was able to promptly pass upon 
much that was submitted, either for rejection or ac- 
ceptance, a vast amount of it had to be submitted to 
the personal judgment of Dr. Sheldon. Not one 


122 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


line of copy was permitted to reach the advertising 
columns of the paper unless it would stand the clos- 
est scrutiny, and was without question from the 
standpoint of morality, integrity and thorough hon- 
esty in both spirit and letter. 

In relating my experiences during this week of 
experiment I am going to mention some things that 
have never been reported, not even by the crowd of 
uninvited newspaper correspondents who came on to 
Topeka that week to get a story for their papers. 
There were some forty of them in all and they 
came more out of curiosity than anything else, and 
I may as well say right here that I did not welcome 
them and shall always believe that their presence 
was undesirable and unfair. I was constantly 
hampered by them in my attempts to carry out my 
original plans, as each one of them wanted special 
interviews and each one was sending on to his paper 
each day some version of the day’s news that con- 
tained more imagination and less fact than the most 
brilliant writer of fiction ever dreamed. ‘There was 
not an hour of the day during a period of seven days, 
when I averaged less than three hours’ sleep in each 
twenty-four, when the newspaper correspondents 
did not try to interfere with my engagements, and 
even the few necessary times when I had to eat and 
write. ‘Therefore I may as well say frankly that 
the Press as represented by the men who were sent 
on to get a story did not give me a fair chance to 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 123 


illustrate in my own way the thing I was trying to 
do, and in looking over the press clippings that were 
made during that week even after the lapse of a 
quarter of a century I might be indignant over the 
reports that the correspondents sent their papers, if 
they were not so tremendously misleading as to be 
laughable. One of the commonest reports that 
nearly every paper published was to the effect that 
the whole affair was a piece of the most astounding 
hypocrisy because I was receiving between $10,000 
and $25,000 as my share of the week’s profits. This 
story was published like a hundred others as pre- 
posterous, in scores of papers, and I suppose thou- 
sands of readers all over the country believed it 
then and if any of them are living they believe it 
now. “It was in the paper,” they say. “Must be 
so.’ It is true that near the end of that week the 
owner of the paper sent to my house a roll of bills. 
amounting to $1,000, but they went back to the 
office by the same messenger who had brought them 
out. 

Over against the handicap and embarrassment of 
the presence of the newspaper men I want to give 
my testimonial to the wonderful helpfulness and 
loyalty of every person connected with the Capital 
from the Business Manager, on whose shoulders 
rested a most tremendous burden, to the Negro jan- 
itors and the youngest cub in the press room. ‘They 
were the most responsive and enthusiastic group of 


124 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


people I have ever seen. They were not individuals 
I had trained and taught to carry out the idea of the 
paper, but they could not have been more eager 
to make it a success if they had been in training for 
years. They obeyed every rule that was posted up 
to their own discomfort and even against their own 
judgment. Every smoker on the paper went with- 
out his pipe or cigar or cigarette while on duty. 
There were countless occasions for profanity as the 
men faced unusual and unknown situations that they 
had never imagined could occur, but I do not re- 
member hearing a single swear word during the en- 
tire week, not even from the men in the composing 
and mailing departments where the tasks were stu- 
pendous and involved; and in the press room where 
a press that had never turned off over 15,000 copies 
a day was driven all day and all night to print 
127,000 copies, the foreman and his assistants lived 
a life of continual anxiety and were under a strain 
that was nerve stretching every moment, but if they 
swore it was silently and to some of them it must 
have been a pent-up experience that cost them much 
sweat and anguish of spirit. The reporters and 
telegraph men, the city editor who sat up all night 
to see the thing through, the Business Manager who 
turned down several thousand dollars’ worth of 
questionable advertisements without an audible mur- 
mur, all of them entered into the week’s trial with 
a whole-hearted and unquestioning alacrity that was 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 125 


in marked contrast with the attitude of the press 
representatives, most of whom ridiculed, and criti- 
cized, and sent garbled reports of the work to their 
papers down east. I do not wish to seem unfair to 
the press, but I have never mentioned all this at 
any time for more than tweny-four years, and do it 
now, not in any spirit of malice, but to state a truth 
which I believe ought to be spoken, in order to make 
clear some facts which have never been published of 
that week. I could have carried out my plans with 
far greater freedom and happiness of mind, if the 
press had sent no representatives, or had at least 
respected the sincerity of purpose of those connected 
with the Capital. But the press reports were for the 
most part so misleading even after the week was 
over that the public never had an opportunity to 
know what had really been done nor the real results 
that had been obtained. 

Acting on the definition of the word ‘‘News”’ 
which we had made, the most important news item 
that came in on the night of March the twelfth, 
1900, was the brief notice of the great famine in 
India. No paper in the United States had featured 
that item or even given it any prominence. It 
seemed to me to be the most important piece of 
world news, and it went in on the front page of the 
first number of the paper, at the left hand column 
which was the regular position the Capital had al- 
ways given to feature news. Along with the news 


126 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


item of the famine I appended a call for financial 
help, asking the readers of the news to send in con- 
tributions. This appeal was placed on the page at 
the beginning of the description of the great need. 
I may say that I still believe that news of that sort 
should be edited. That is, I believe that editorial 
comment on great events should be directly made 
on the page that prints the event. ‘The first great 
daily in this country to print editorial comment di- 
rectly under or over the news item that calls for 
such comment, instead of putting the comment on 
what is called an editorial page, will have a reading 
such as no editorials now have. I believe news 
ought to be intelligently interpreted to the news- 
paper reader. He does not know in many cases 
what the news item means. The editor ought to be 
able to tell him. If the editorial is written immedi- 
ately under or over the news it willbe read. Itisa 
question whether the average editorial in the regu- 
lar dailies of this country is read by more than two 
per cent of the paper readers. If they were, some 
of them at least, put on the first page, every one 
would read them. If editorials are written to be 
read why not put them where the reader will read 
them? 

As a direct result of the appeal for help in the 
case of the India famine sufferers a train load of 
Kansas corn was sent by the Kansas farmers to 


New York and the Christian Herald chartered a 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN. DAILY § 127 


ship and sent the cargo to Bombay where it was un- 
loaded and distributed all over the famine district. 
In correspondence which came to me months after- 
wards, the missionaries told me of hundreds and 
even thousands of cases where this Kansas corn 
saved the lives of starving children some of whom 
are now living and holding large and responsible 
positions under the British government. Sometimes 
when people have asked me if the paper were not 
a failure, as the press reports for the most part said 
it was, I have replied that if it accomplished noth- 
ing more than saving several thousand children from 
starvation I would always feel as if the paper was a 
success, if it did nothing else. 

Besides the ship load of corn that was contributed, 
I forwarded from the Capital office that week and 
for weeks afterwards money contributions for the 
famine that came in amounts totaling over $40,000 
which was disbursed by different church and mis- 
sionary organizations. ‘This money came from all 
over the world in response to an appeal that took up 
less than two inches of type in the Capital. During 
the remainder of the week of the Capital issues, the 
Christian Herald carried a half page advertisement 
making an appeal for the people of India and stat- 
ing that the British Secretary of State for India 
would pay for all transportation charges of food 
sent from this country. he Herald received in re- 
sponse to that appeal over $50,000 in cash besides 


128 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


the train load of corn given by Kansas farmers. So 
that it is within bounds to say that over $100,000 
worth of food and relief was sent to a starving peo- 
ple from the first item of news published in the 
Daily Capital on March 19, 1900. From 1897 to 
1904 the Christian Herald sent $732,187 to the 
India Famine Relief. Between 1900 and 1904 half 
that amount was sent as records show, $50,000 due 
to appeal in Capital. 

It may be interesting to the reader of this narra- 
tive to know what subjects were discussed in the 
week’s paper that was being published as near as pos- 
sible by the standard of a Christian daily. Con- 
sidering the fact that a majority of the newspaper 
correspondents after the week was over character- 
ized the paper as deadly dull, and a failure as a 
newspaper it seems no more than fair to let the 
actual contents of the six days’ issues speak for them- 
selves. Here are some of the titles of articles pub- 
lished and news items discussed either editorially 
or on the news pages: 

Starving India: ‘The War Spirit Denounced: 
(Wars going on at time were the war in the Philip- 
pines and the Boer war.) Is the Boer War Just? 
(Answer, No.) New Books: with reviews by well- 
known authors. Federal Reforms: Against Ciga- 
rettes: The Kindergarten Schools: ‘The Philip- 
pines: (A history of their internal affairs. First 
published.) Letters from Famous People: Sunday 





VOO;OOOM SUBSCRIPTIONS IN THIS DAY’S MAIL, THE 
MONDAY BEFORE THE WEEK THE PAPER WENT TO PRESS. 
TOPEKA DAILY CAPITAL, MARCH 13-20, I9QOO. 


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THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 129 


Observance: Market Reports: (Abbreviated, on 
account of some questionable transactions at the 
time on the stock markets.) Prison Reform: Li- 
quor advertisements in magazines: (A _ protest 
against them. Personal letters were written by Kan- 
sas people against them, and they were discarded 
from the magazines when contracts ran out.) Kan- 
sas Millers: Live Stock Market: Mormonism: 
The Tax Dodger: (With a cartoon by a well 
known artist.) The Union of the Churches: (A 
front page editorial.) Woman Suffrage: (Advo- 
cated.) Extracts from the Brewers’ Journal con- 
ceding progress of Prohibition in Kansas: Munici- 
pal Ownership: In Labor’s Behalf: Appeal for 
Cleaner Humor: Tenement House Reform: 
League of Mothers: Police Department: (A plea 
for better pay.) Women’s Clubs: The Y. W. C. 
A.: Dairying in Kansas: (A very valuable series 
of articles written by F. D. Coburn, then Secretary 
of Agriculture of Kansas. These articles were re- 
printed in papers all over the world.) Social Settle- 
ments: Against War: (Written by Dr. Parkhurst 
of New York.) Poem on front page, “If Christ 
Should Come Today,” by Helen A. Beard. Sunday 
School Lessons: Churches of Topeka: Letters from 
Ministers: Armenian Massacres: (A protest.) 
Disease Prevention. 

These, of course, were only a very few of the 
topics discussed in the seven issues of the paper as 


180 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


published. Many of the articles were freely contri- 
buted; in fact, not one cent was paid for any contri- 
bution as the writers all agreed to contribute without 
compensation. Among the contributors were Bishop 
John H. Vincent who wrote the prayer which began 
the news on the first page of the first issue of the 
paper; Dr. J. E. Abbott, Bombay Mission; C. N. 
Howard, Rochester, New York; F. D. Coburn, Sec- 
retary State Agriculture; Governor W. E. Stanley; 
Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus; Whitelaw Reid; Associate 
Justice David J. Brewer; Wilbur F. Crafts; Frank 
Parsons; Leonard D. Abbott; Frank Beard, Car- 
toonist; also Myron A. Waterman contributed 
some very telling cartoons, and very many other 
local writers who wrote signed articles that were 
afterwards copied in many papers here and abroad. 

If the paper was characterized as dull by most of 
the newspaper correspondents as it was, it is also 
true that the subscribers received their money’s 
worth in contributed articles that even judged by 
the standard of the best magazines today were of 
the highest order as literary and valuable contribu- 
tions able to stand comparison with any monthly 
table of contents in any periodical of the present 
time. 

One reason for the assumption that the Christian 
daily was dull may be found in the fact that crime 
and scandal and sensational divorce cases were ab- 
sent from its pages. Crime when it was reported 





THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 131 


was reported briefly and the emphasis placed on the 
cause, and the remedy, which is the only scientific 
way to report crime. It is the way the Bible always 
reports it, and the Bible is the most scientific world 
news reporter that was ever compiled. It is a 
childish and useless way to depict human frailty 
simply for the sake of creating a mental sensation 
in the reader. Which is the regular and stupid man- 
ner of presenting human sin by those dailies that 
print elaborate stories of any moral lapses. The 
rule that was observed during the week was the 
rule of the Bible method, and in time that rule will 
be observed by all the daily press. 

An illustration of the plan to be pursued in case 
of what is generally used to create a mental excite- 
ment in the reader occurred in the office force of the 
Capital itself. A son of Senator Peffer of Kansas, 
who, by the way, was as highly respected and hon- 
ored by his townspeople and by Kansas generally as 
he was caricatured and dishonored by the public 
that did not know him, happened to be an employee 
on the Capital during the week I was in charge. 

He was working in the advertising section on 
Tuesday and at the end of the day went down to 
Kansas City, and in a fit of despondency committed 
suicide, leaving a note addressed to his father, say- 
ing, ‘Father, I don’t like to do what I am doing, 
but I am tired.” 

The fact of the suicide we published in the 


132 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Thursday edition together with the note he had left, 
and after the item, I wrote,—‘‘The Capital extends 
to Senator Peffer and his family profound sympa- 
thy in the time of their trouble. May the God of 
all comfort bless and strengthen all those who 
mourn.” | 

The news of the suicide reached one of the Capi- 
tal reporters before we received it in the office, and 
I remember he came running in with it to me asking 
for instructions as to going right up to Senator Pef- 
fers home and interviewing the family to get 
inside facts about the affair. I not only refused to 
let any reporter go to the house, but I turned down 
a lengthy account of the matter which came up from 
Kansas City in which there was a detailed descrip- 
tion of the room where the young man was found, 
and more than a hint at some tragic motive other 
than the reason given in the note he left for his 
father. It seemed to me at the time and does yet 
and always will, that such a human tragedy should 
be reported, if at all, in the briefest and most sympa- 
thetic manner. I see nothing to be gained by relat- 
ing the ghastly details of human frailty and sin. 
Even the tremendous and unparalleled story of the 
betrayal of Jesus by Judas is told in the gospel nar- 
rative in a space less than one-third of a newspaper 
column, and the Crucifixion itself occupies what 
would be only a little over a single column in a mod- 


ern metropolitan daily. The greatest examples we - 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 133 


know of ideal reporting of tragedy are to be found 
in the New Testament, and they are ideal because 
they do not attempt to report detail. 

The Capital being a morning paper had a Sunday 
edition. Owing to the fact that Sunday papers were 
then and are yet not popular with me it was at first 
something of a problem to know how we were to 
give our subscribers seven issues a week for their 
week’s subscription price. But with the combined 
and willing codperation of everyone on the paper, 
and at enormous loss of sleep and meals we issued 
a Saturday afternoon edition in place of the Sunday 
morning paper. ‘This edition was off the press at 
eleven fifteen Saturday morning, in spite of the fact 
that the Saturday morning issue did not come off the 
press until two thirty A. M. One reason for the 
overcoming of what seemed like superhuman difhi- 
culties was the fact that much of the matter that 
made up the Saturday afternoon edition was set 
up in advance the day before, for the afternoon 
paper was made up entirely of extracts from the 
Bible, and articles about it. There was not one line 
of local or national news in that issue. 

The main heading of the Saturday afternoon edi- 
tion was—‘‘The Bible: The Basis of Our Christian 
Civilization.” ‘The leading sentence on the head of 
the first column was Daniel Webster’s Epitaph, 
written by himself, and copied from his tomb at 
Marshfield, Massachusetts: 


134 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


“Lord, I believe. Help Thou mine unbelief. 
Philosophical argument, especially that drawn from 
the vastness of the universe in comparison with the 
apparent insignificance of this globe, has sometimes 
shaken my reason for the faith that is in me; but 
my heart has assured me that the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ must be a divine reality. The Sermon on the 
Mount cannot be a merely human production. This 
belief enters into the very depth of my conscience. 
The whole history of man proves it.” 

Immediately following this came the Sermon on 
the Mount which was printed from the revised ver- 
sion, entire. It occupied less than two columns. 
The rest of the paper, which was the regular eight 
page form published every day, was filled, outside 
the advertising space, with Bible teaching. Some 
of the topics were Usury; The Sabbath; Money 
and Riches; Marriage; Evil of Drink; War; 
The Future; The Love Chapter. There was a 
summary of the Bible in History furnished by the 
American Bible Society. The Christian Herald’s 
advertisement in this Saturday afternoon edition was 
given up entirely to featuring their Red Letter New 
Testament which prints all the sayings of Jesus in 
red ink. I think it can safely be said that after re- 
covering from their shock in having a newspaper 
without any news in it, many of the subscribers 
read for the first time, perhaps, the whole of the 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 135 


Sermon on the Mount at a sitting, and it may have 
been news to some of them. 

In an editorial printed on the front page I took 
occasion to preach a little sermon on the value of 
Sunday as a day of rest and worship. I also said 
to the subscribers, ‘“There has been no Sunday work 
on this paper. The press and mailing work stopped 
before midnight of Saturday. The carriers were 
instructed to deliver their papers in time to reach 
home themselves before Sunday. There will be no 
papers sold or delivered on Sunday with the ap- 
proval of the editor. May God bless the use of the 
press of the world to the glory of His kingdom on 
earth.” 

The story of this crude attempt to illustrate my 
thought of a Christian daily would not be complete 
or honest if there were not mention made of some 
of those who coéperated with the editor to carry out 
his plans. I am sorry that the lapse of time has 
dimmed my own memory of many worthy names. 
But I did insist on the printing of the roster of the 
Capital force, as it was turned over to me, every 
day at the head of the Editorial page. It men- 
tioned the names of those who were connected with 
the Editorial Staff, the Business Department, the 
Composing Room, the Stereotyping Room, the 
Press Room and the Mailing Room. Mr. Harold 
T. Chase, the present editor of the Capital, was 
my Associate Editor. He was the one person who 


136 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


sat up nights with me and answered, or tried 
to, all sorts of questions about the technical 
details of the paper most of which displayed vast 
ignorance on my part, he wrestled with the cor- 
respondents, and racked his brains to find fillers 
which would pass the censor, he must have felt many 
times like throwing the entire edition into the Hell 
Box, and he must have sighed the sigh of relief of 
his life when the ghost walked Saturday night. 
But he never left me in the lurch at the yell of 
‘Thirty !’? which sounded often from the composing 
room, and I can truly say it would have been ab- 
solutely impossible for me to have carried on that 
week if it had not been for the companionship and 
patience and enthusiasm and whole-hearted loyalty 
of Mr. Chase. 

The same must be said of the work done by the 
Business Manager, Mr. Dell Keizer, whom I did not 
see or companion with as I did with Mr. Chase, but 
the amount of work he did was marvelous, and he 
successfully met many problems which seemed in- 
soluble. ‘The account in this story of the way 
the paper was handled in its actual printing and 
distribution is his account and it is but a mere outline 
of the keen and intelligent and ready mind which he 
exercised at all points that week. He acted on every 
occasion as if the paper was an established fact a 
hundred years old, as if I owned it in fee simple, 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 137 


and there was not the shadow of a doubt in his mind 
that whatever was done was all right even when, I 
am sometimes constrained to believe, he felt back 
in his mind that it was all wrong. 

The same codperation and loyalty to the paper’s 
purpose was shown by Mr. J. Frank Jarrell, the 
News Editor at the head of the reportorial group. 
He was the very ideal of respect for the editor and 
his rulings, he never for one moment criticized or 
argued or cited past practices. He did as all the 
others did and acted as if the paper had come to 
stay for all time and we were working together on 
a plan that would be good for years. I have never 
ceased to feel keenly his loyalty and enthusiastic 
support all through that nerve-testing week. 

Of Mr. Robert Maxwell’s work as Foreman in 
the Press Room I did not have close acquaintance, 
but I had reason to be thankful and always will be 
for the skill and faithfulness he showed every min- 
ute as he nursed the old Capital Press along from 
the ordinary task of running off twelve or fifteen 
thousand copies a day to one hundred and twenty 
or twenty-seven thousand a day. He could no doubt 
write a book about how he did it, and if he ever does 
I will buy the first copy. 

Mr. John P. Fritts was our Washington cor- 
respondent. Miss Jessie M. Garwood, who was 
afterwards married to him by me in the first wed- 
ding ever celebrated in the Central Congregational 


188 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Church, was the Society and Club reporter. Inas- 
much as there was no society news printed in the 
entire edition, I cannot recall exactly what Miss 
Garwood really did. I remember the disgust that 
spread over certain portions of Topeka society when 
certain social events were not reported as usual. 
But it seemed to me then and it does yet that there 
are so many really important things going on in this 
world that the event of Mrs. Somebody inviting 
other Mrs. Somebodies to a lunch or a dance to- 
gether with the list of guests, male and female, is so 
small that it does not deserve any place in a daily 
account of the doings of the sons and daughters of 
men. At any rate there were no accounts of society 
doings in the paper that week, and I am inclined 
to think that the society reporter enjoyed a needed 
rest and had time to read the interesting correspond- 
ence that the young man in Washington was send- 
ing in. 

There were so many persons connected with the 
making and distributing of the paper that personal 
mention of them, even of the heads of departments, 
is impossible. Mr. H. S. Houston was the Eastern 
manager and he displayed remarkable talent in se- 
curing codperation of eastern newspaper men. Mr. 
P. C. Chamberlain was the Circulation manager and 
his week was as unusual as that of any other he had 
ever known. Mr. George W. Hart, the Associated 
Press Operator stood by his place with a persistence 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 139 


and patience that I have never ceased to marvel 
over. Mr. Clyde Reed, who routed out the paper, 
has already been mentioned in the Business Man- 
ager’s account. His was pioneer work and no one 
could have faced the unusual in journalism with 
more courage and resourcefulness. 

I do not believe that any man ever had a more 
loyal support for what must have seemed to some 
of those who were on the pay roll of the Capital to 
be a fantastic experiment of little or no value. I 
am convinced after this lapse of time that in the 
nature of the case many of the employees and work- 
ers on the Capital staff must have looked upon me as 
a freak or at least as perhaps a little off. But if 
they did, they did not show it, and I doubt if a 
picked body of personally trained journalists spe- 
cially educated to make a Christian daily could have 
entered into the general policy of the paper any 
more enthusiastically and faithfully than did the 
entire body of regular employees and also those who 
were employed as extras. 

In the opening editorial of the issue of Tuesday, 
March 13, I said that I would receive no financial 
compensation but that a share of the profits might be 
given to some benevolent work. At the end of the 
week $5,000 was deposited in the bank subject to 
my order, and $1,000 was sent to the India Famine 
Relief, $1,000 was used to build a hospital room 
for the city jail, $1,000 was given to Washburn 


140 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


College, $500 to the Topeka Young Men’s Christian 
Association, $500 to the Orphans’ Home, $500 for 
a city drinking fountain, and the balance was divided 
among the other charitable institutions of the city. 
During the week of the paper I averaged about 
three hours’ sleep a day. I had a room at a down- 
town hotel and did not go home but once during 
the week. If I had it to do again I would not 
change in any radical way the plan that was fol- 
lowed. It was clearer to me than to any one else 
that the experiment was only at its best a hint of 
what might be. I have faith to believe that the 
ideal Christian daily is going to be evolved some- 
time perhaps by the combined money and energy 
and talent of the Protestant churches of America. 
The fact that one of the great denominations has 
lately asked for such a daily is significant. In any 
case I have never ceased to feel the deepest interest 
in a journalism that might be in the highest sense 
a living word, speaking every turn of the earth for 
the welfare of men, and helping to create a practical 
happiness and good will in the hearts of all who 
read it and honor its daily Voice by following the 
beckoning of the majestic thing called The Truth. 
In looking over the press notices which com- 
mented on the paper I find that the most frequent 
criticism, made oftener by ministers than by any one 
else, was the severe objection to the thought of 
Jesus taking any part in such a prosaic and material 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 141 


thing as a daily paper. The terms ‘blasphemous,’ 
“sacrilegious,” “irreverent,” are the terms used to 
describe what the critics called an irreligious at- 
tempt to think of Jesus as participating in any of 
the common everyday things that mere human be- 
ings have to do for a living. 

This thought of Jesus in history is so strange to 
me that I cannot let this account of an attempt to 
imitate Jesus in the work of journalism pass without 
comment. The entire concept of Christianity to my 
mind is entirely stripped of its tremendous meaning 
if we do not think of Jesus as the most vitally inter- 
ested Being that ever lived, in the common everyday 
doings of humanity. If Jesus could not take part in 
the publishing of a daily paper, then He could not 
participate in any other energy that we have to use 
in order to make a living. Hundreds of ministers 
in these press notices said that Jesus would never de- 
scend to anything except preaching. ‘They seem to 
forget that the greater part of His life was passed 
in a carpenter’s shop, and that the tables and 
benches and common wooden things in many a home 
of Nazareth were doubtless made by His hands. It 
is a monstrous perversion of all our right ideas of 
the Redeemer of the world to place Him in a posi- 
tion that removes Him from the everyday life of 
mankind. ‘The vast majority of the people of this 
world are not preachers and missionaries and teach- 
ers but working men and women, toiling over some 


142 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


task that has to do with material things, with tools 
of hard dirty labor, with common earthly things 
that have to do with the production of food and the 
preparation of it for the table. The thought of 
Jesus that makes it sacrilegious for us to think of 
Him as engaged in any form of honest work is so 
contrary to His own teaching and life that I do not 
understand how any minister of the gospel ever came 
to call it by that term. 

I am inclined to think the whole false definition of 
Jesus goes back to the whole false thought of a 
Divine Being. It takes centuries to clear the human 
mind of the falsehood of a God who sits on a throne 
and does nothing but sit there and meditate on the 
awful sins of the creatures He has made. But the 
thought of a Divine Being who walks with men on 
the earth, who eats with them and goes out fishing 
with them and takes his turn at the oar, as no doubt 
Jesus did, who even goes so far as to provide with 
His own hands a breakfast for a number of tired and 
hungry fishermen, and to do it after He was’a risen 
and eternal spirit,—that thought is so great to me 
that the idea of Jesus trying to publish a necessary 
daily paper for the welfare of mankind is not only 
not “sacrilegious” or “irreverent” but any other 
thought of Him is absolutely contrary to His pur- 
pose in coming into the world. We have no such 
thing as Christianity unless we have a definition 
of it in terms of abundant life, as wide as man’s 


THE STORY OF A CHRISTIAN DAILY 143 


activity, and as sacred as the everyday toil of the 
hands of Him who was nailed on a cross because He 
angered the Pharisees in letting His disciples satisfy 
their hunger as they walked through the wheat fields 
of Palestine on that Sabbath morning two thousand 
years ago. 


CHAPTER SIX 
THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 


This is not going to be a dull recital of a prohibi- 
tion campaign, but simply a plain everyday account 
of some of the things that occurred during what was 
to me one of the most exciting and interesting speak- 
ing programs ever carried on in this country. I can 
speak of it that way because the initiative for it 
and the planning of it were due to the work of two 
very remarkable men, Governor J. Frank Hanly of 
Indiana and Oliver Wayne Stewart of Illinois. 

Brooding over the evils of the saloon and distil- 
lery for years, Governor Hanly finally determined to 
enlist personally in a speaking campaign that would 
make an impression on the minds and consciences of 
the entire nation. And as a preliminary to the plan 
that was working out in his own mind, he and Mr. 
Stewart together addressed large mass meetings in 
several states and created sentiment and enthusiasm 
for a nation-wide movement looking towards na- 
tional prohibition. 

This was during the years 1913 and 1914. Dur- 
ing that period a large sum of money was raised by 


voluntary pledges and gifts to finance the plan that 
144 


THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 145 


was afterwards carried out. Twenty-five thousand 
dollars of that amount was given by Governor 
Hanly to the temperance workers of California just 
before their election, and was used effectively to 
bring about the final result in that state. ‘The out- 
line of the plan of the Squadron, never before tried 
by any temperance society, was unique and as soon 
as it was put into concrete form it caught the popu- 
lar imagination and made possible its practical 
success. 

The first part of this plan was to organize three 
groups of people who would be in perfect sympathy 
with the purpose of the plan, and would work 
together to carry it out. The purpose was the 
creation of national sentiment and enthusiasm for 
national prohibition of the liquor traffic. The pro- 
gram of the plan was the covering of the entire 
country with a succession of prohibition meetings, 
non-sectarian and non-political but at the same time 
so interesting and unusual that a whole town or 
city would be attracted to them, in spite of the hack- 
neyed word “prohibition.” 

The statements that Governor Hanly sent out be- 
fore the campaign actually began are so admirable 
and characteristic of the man that they will bear re- 
peating: 

“Our field is the United States; Our dream a 
Saloonless Land, a Stainless Flag, a Sober People; 


146 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


To be attained through an enlightened, an aroused 
and a crystallized public opinion. 

“We are not officially connected with any other 
existing temperance organization. We are the 
friends of all; the enemies of none. We war only 
against the Liquor Traffic. 

‘“The campaign in which we are engaged has, we 
believe, no parallel in the history of any movement. 
When completed it will be without precedent. While 
we go to help any local fight that may be on, or 
any state contest that may be waging, ours is the 
National struggle. We battle for the nation. The 
event is in the hand of God.” 

Three groups of people consisting of speakers, 
singers and musicians were formed with the under- 
standing that no salaries would be guaranteed, that 
if necessary nothing but the actual travel expenses 
would be met, and that the Cause itself would be all 
the reward that any member of the Squadron would 
expect to receive. In that spirit it is safe to say that 
every member of the Squadron enlisted for what 
proved to be for those who were with it to the end 
the most unique experience that any one of them — 
had ever known. | 

While these groups were being chosen Mr. Stew- 
art with the help of railroad experts made out the 
train route, including the towns and cities to be vis- 
ited. ‘This involved an immense and complicated 
study of railroad time tables and called for advance 


THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 14’ 


work out in the field by agents to make dates, secure 
speaking places, arrange for local committees, church 
cooperation, advertising by press and local bulletins 
and wall and street posters and all the detailed pub- 
licity necessary for a series of meetings that con- 
templated covering the entire United States within 
eight months’ time. The way in which Mr. Stew- 
art worked out this entire program of railroad and 
hotel and travel plan may be judged from the fact 
that the Squadron visited two hundred and fifty-five | 
cities and towns in two hundred and thirty-five days’ 
without a date or a place being missed. It is not 
boasting to say that such a travel program was never 
before carried out and none like it has ever been at- 
tempted by any group of theatrical or entertainment 
people or by any political group. Railroad men said 
after the Squadron had finished its meetings at At- 
lantic City that the record of continuous train con- 
nections made without any special favors of any 
road was absolutely without any comparison in all 
the annals of railroading. 

The name “Squadron” was coined by Richmond 
Pearson Hobson and the term ‘“‘Flying’”’ was added 
to it as a fit adjective. The name caught the popu- 
lar fancy and was apparently descriptive of the ac- 
tual course of the organization as it moved daily 
across the United States in its three groups that suc- 
ceeded one another in the successive meetings held 
for three successive days in each town visited. 


148 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


The campaign began in the biggest whisky center 
in the United States, Peoria, [linois, September 30, 
1914. The first group of speakers, singers and mu- 
sicians had two meetings, one in the afternoon, and 
one in the evening, took up a free will offering to 
defray the expenses of the Squadron, and moved on 
the next morning to Galesburg, Illinois. ‘The second 
group moved into Peoria and held the same meetings 
there while the first group was in Galesburg, and 
when they moved on to Galesburg, the third group 
started their meetings in Peoria as the first group 
went on to Kansas City, Missouri. 

This was the plan followed for eight months con- 
tinuously, including Saturdays and Sundays, as the 
Flying Squadron campaign did not permit of any rest 
days for the members. A summary of the states 
and the places visited from the date of September 
30, 1914, may be interesting, taking the itinerary by 
months. 

The states entered for meetings in the month of 
October were Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, 
Texas, Arizona, California, Nevada, Washington. 
In November the Squadron entered and had daily 
meetings in Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, 
South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Wisconsin, 
Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massa- 
chusetts and New Hampshire. In December the 
three groups in turn went into Rhode Island, New 
York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, the District of 


THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 149 


Columbia, Maryland, West Virginia and Ohio. 
The January campaign began on the first day of 
1915 in Evansville, Indiana, at a time when on ac- 
count of the New Year festivities all over the city 
the statement was made that the Squadron meet- 
ings would not be attended. The largest hall in the 
city was crowded and overflowed at each of the two 
meetings held by the first group, and when the next 
two groups came on, overflow meetings were neces- 
sary. During this month the Squadron moved along 
into Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Michi- 
gan, New York and Pennsylvania. February saw 
the Squadron speaking all the way from Maine to 
Florida. The route followed was New Jersey, New 
York, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, 
Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Caro- 
lina, Georgia and Florida. During the dead of 
winter in New England we were never blocked by 
the snow and the attendance on the meetings even 
during very severe weather taxed the capacity of the 
halls and churches to the limit of space. 

The first day of March saw the first team of the 
Squadron in Orlando, Florida. From there the 
three groups moved west through Alabama, 
Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisi- 
ana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New 
Mexico. 

April began the campaign in Colorado and swept 
across Wyoming, back into Colorado, into Utah, 


150 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Idaho, Colorado again, Nebraska, Missouri, Kan- 
sas, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri again, lowa, Wiscon- 
sin and Indiana. 

In May the meetings began in Ohio, went into 
Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, back into 
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York and New 
Jersey. 

During the four days of June that the meetings 
continued we went into Wilmington, Delaware; Phil- 
adelphia; Camden, New Jersey, and held the closing 
meetings at Atlantic City, Sunday, June 6, 1915. 

A summary of the log of the Flying Squadron be- 
ginning with September 30, 1914, and ending with 
June 6, 1915, shows that the three groups of speak- 
ers addressed one million and a half people, be- 
sides receiving unusual quantities of press notice, in 
some cases amounting to special editions of dailies. 
Every capital city of every state was entered by 
every one of the three groups. ‘The entire country 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific was traversed twice 
and from the Lakes to the Gulf almost four times; 
the entire distance traveled was 65,000 miles. Not 
a single date out of 235 different towns and cities 
was missed and because it was possible in some states 
to enter two cities on the same day, the Squadron 
actually spoke in 255 different towns. All this in- 
side of eight morths counting out one week of the 
Christmas holidays, when no meetings were held. 
During the actual speaking tour the speakers and 


THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 151 


singers and musicians had no rest days, Saturdays 
being all listed and on Sundays extra overflow meet- 
ings were in a majority of cases called for on ac- 
count of the great audiences and the intense inter- 
est and enthusiasm. ‘Ihe expenses of the three 
groups were met entirely by the free will offerings 
of the people who attended the meetings. There was 
not any fund aside from these daily gifts, with the 
exception of one gift of $10,000 made at the begin- 
ning of the campaign by the Hon. John B. Lewis 
of Boston. When the final accounting was made of 
the financial standing of the Squadron after the 
June 6 meeting at Atlantic City, the report of the 
Treasurer showed that every bill had been met in- 
cluding very large printing and hotel and hall rental 
bills, including the entire expenses of the members of 
the Squadron and enough left to enable the members 
to get home. When all matters were finally settled 
each member of the organization received a small 
amount, averaging less than $100 apiece. The 
stories of the liquor men published in their organs 
that this was the greatest exhibition of graft ever 
imposed on the American public was scarcely borne 
out by the fact that every member of the Squadron 
had taken eight months out of a busy life to risk 
health and position and even life itself in the extraor- 
dinary expenditure of unparalleled service, all for 
less than $100 as a final payment in money. In all, 
the public which sustained the traveling expenses of 


152 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


eighteen or twenty men and women in this speak- 
ing campaign contributed in free will offerings over 
$125,000. This money came in the form of cash, 
of checks, of pledges made payable in thirty days. 
And to the credit of the public be it said that the 
pledges were paid with practically no lapses or need 
of reminder afterwards. 

For assistance in handling the necessary business 
of the different groups each had a secretary whose 
business it was to engage sleeping accommodations 
on trains, reservations at hotels, see to the publicity 
and the sale of books and other printed matter car- 
ried by the Squadron and after the meetings were 
over at night to count the money, check up, and 
whenever possible bank it or leave with the hotel 
for the last group headed by Governor Hanly. 
Also the Secretary was the trouble clerk for every 
conceivable sort of emergency that might arise from 
the loss of suit cases en route to warning the mem- 
bers of his group of train time, and waking them up 
when they fell asleep at Junctions. 

But the matter of counting the money very soon 
assumed such serious proportions that every member 
of the group including the speakers and singers and 
musicians soon had to be called in to help the Secre- 
tary in this duty. One illustration will tell the story 
of the daily and nightly task after a long day of 
speaking and the strain of facing immense audiences 
often without sufficient time to eat or rest properly. 





THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 153 
When we left Topeka, Kansas, March 30, after 


the evening meeting we took a Santa Fé train at 
midnight for Rocky Ford, Colorado. In a suit case 
in charge of the Secretary was the evening offering, 
$927 in cash, from one cent to a dollar in hard 
money, bills from one to ten denomination, checks, 
and pledges, the latter on cards we had printed for 
the purpose, and large amounts of the paper money 
in envelopes which were sealed. Along with the 
envelopes were small lead pencils about two inches 
long which we gave out with each envelope. For 
these we had paid for the first lot we bought, $500. 
After an offering had been taken these pencils were 
thrown into the baskets together with the money 
and the cards and envelopes. 

This entire mess we poured out into one of the 
sleeping berths the minute we entered the train and 
began to sort out and check up. It was three o’clock 
in the morning when we finally had the $927 rolled 
up, the pledges listed by themselves, the checking 
up gone over by every member and the Secretary’s 
O. K. certified for Governor Hanly to be left in 
the bank at the next town. We had a little sleep, 
waked up in Colorado and rolled into Rocky Ford 
in time to walk out of the train into the Hall for 
our two-thirty P. M. meeting before going to the 
hotel or seeing the town. 

This task of counting the daily free will offer- 
ing soon came to be reckoned by the members of the 


154 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


groups as one of the regular daily tasks which had in 
it a certain pleasurable excitement. I was given the 
part of counting the silver and nickels and pennies 
and rolling them up in paper wrappers according to 
each coin’s denomination and soon acquired the offi- 
cial title of the ‘Holy Roller.’’ During those pe- 
riods after the days’s orating was over and the 
shouting and the applause of the multitude had 
ceased, it was not altogether like an anti-climax to 
spread the day’s offering out on the hotel bed and 
without any mercenary feeling wonder how much it 
was this time. ‘here was one sober occasion when 
our division closed a day’s work and at the end, 
after the money had been all counted to the last re- 
ligious penny, we found that there was just enough 
to pay our hotel bill and secure our transportation 
to the next town. After we had bought a small 
lunch with the remains of the small change the mem- 
bers all together found in their own pockets, we 
went into the afternoon meeting before an immense 
crowd and another in the evening that choked the 
aisles and sat all over the platform, each one of us 
realizing as he soared his best with prohibition argu- 
ment and eloquence that our combined financial cap- 
ital did not amount to enough to buy the evening 
paper that told of the “wonderful prohibition meet- 
ing at the Auditorium this afternoon.”’ But the 
offering of that day put over five hundred dollars 
into the balance for Governor Hanly to check up 


ee 


THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 155 


when his division came along. Take it all in all the 
free will offerings that kept us going were astonish- 
ing in nearly every state and especially in the south 
which was suffering at that time from great finan- 
cial depression from nine cent cotton and all sorts 
of losses. But in spite of warnings sent to Gover- 
nor Hanly by well-meaning prohibition friends not 
to go into the south for fear of total failure, the 
southern states were more lavish with their money, 
as far as they had any, than any other part of the 
United States, and among all our memories of dif- 
ferent sections, brief and fleeting and swiftly passing 
as they all were, the pictures of the South, of the 
enthusiasm and heartiness and response to speakers 
and singers and to the Squadron idea generally are 
vivid with outline and color. I shall always re- 
member my late-at-night task of filling the office of 
the ‘Holy Roller” and I can truly say that never 
before nor since have I handled and counted and 
rolled so much money. And the strange thing about 
the money part of the campaign was that the sec- 
ond division always had a larger offering than the 
first, which was mine, and when Governor Hanly and 
his third group came along to hold the same kind of 
meeting in the same town and with an audience that 
must have been made up of about the same people, 
he secured more than the first or the second divi- 
sions, and sometimes as much as both of them put 
together. 


156 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


The inscriptions on the money envelopes, es- 
pecially while the Squadron was passing through the 
south, were revelations of the feelings of the givers. 
Here are a few of them: 

“With a prayer.” 

Gastar Nesp ateooing.” 

“A saved booze fighter.” 

“All right, Governor.” 

“God help you fight the traffic for the sake of 
my boys.” 

“T wish it were $10,000.” 

‘From one whose brother went to a drunkard’s 
death by the pistol route.” 

‘Two blood relations cursed with the foul thing 
you are fighting.” 

“God speed the work.” 

“Five dollars in memory of Lincoln’s Birthday, 
LOLS 

“My third gift to a beloved cause.” 

And yet some people in the United States and 
many overseas wondered that a nation could in such 
a short time by popular vote and by a deliberate 
act of the people’s congress pass a national pro- 
hibitory law. ‘They did not realize the deep and 
passionate conviction in the breast of the common 
people of this country that the liquor trafic had 
traded away its right to be a part of the business 
life of the nation on account of its record as a crime 
and sorrow-producing thing, unworthy to live. As 


THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 157 


we went on our daily journey over the states and 
saw the crowds that thronged under every condition 
of weather and every opposition from a hostile press 
that in some towns ridiculed and made light of 
_ popular demonstration we knew that the end of the 
saloon was not far off. 

But the press as a whole helped the Squadron 
with splendid reports of the daily programs and 
also with editorial comment. It was a different press 
from that of ten or even five years before. It had 
begun to sense the people’s demand, and with the 
exception of a few of the great metropolitan dailies 
the Squadron had great backing from most of the 
papers in every state. I am more than glad to pay 
this tribute because the daily press twenty-five years 
ago was carrying page advertisements of beer and 
whisky and lending aid and support to the traffic. 
But that day has gone forever. 

The dramatic incidents that occurred during the 
eight months’ campaign of the Squadron would make 
a library. They were of such a variety and char- 
acter that not even a daily diary could give a record 
of them. 

In Rochester, New York, our meeting was in a 
Baptist Church. Dr. D. V. Poling, the uncle of 
Dan A. Poling, my colleague as speaker in the first 
division, was our singer. He was late that after- 
noon in coming on the platform, and when the chair- 
man announced his number he was just entering the 


158 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


church. To avoid passing in front of the people 
who were seated on the platform Dr. Poling opened 
a door at the rear of the platform which he sup- 
posed opened on a rear platform passage, and 
stepped into the baptistry which had been left full 
of water. The chairman being deaf did not hear 
the splash as Dr. Poling went under, and announced 
his name again as the singer of the day. But Dan 
Poling rose to the occasion and announced with 
great gravity, “Mr. Chairman and ladies and gen- 
tlemen, I regret to say that my uncle has just joined 
the ‘Wets’!’’ It should be said for Dr. Poling’s 
reputation for being a “good sport’ that after he 
emerged from his plunge he ran back to the hotel, 
made a rapid change of garments and appeared 
again in time to take his place on the program to 
the delight of the audience. That day the singers 
and musicians received more enthusiastic applause 
than the two speakers together. 

The erratic train schedule of the Squadron made 
anything like regular physical habits absolutely im- 
possible. The evening meetings never closed before 
nine thirty; oftener it would be ten o’clock before 
we were back at the hotel to pack up, count the offer- 
ing, or if impossible to pour it into a suit case and 
make a hurry run to the train for the night ride to 
the next town. Meals were eaten at any hour. It is 
safe to say that there was not one hour in the twenty- 


THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 159 


four excepting the time we were on the platform 
speaking that we did not at some time or other 
utilize for eating. We boarded trains at all hours 
of the day and night. We made our toilets on the 
sleepers oftener than anywhere else. We ate at 
3 and 4 o’clock A. M. in Greek restaurants. We 
broke every rule of diet and sleep and exercise and 
every rule of rest and recreation that was ever made 
for the welfare of the physical system, and yet 
every member of every division emerged from the 
grilling campaign in good condition. There were 
of course times when individual speakers and sing- 
ers came near a breakdown under the terrific strain. 
All of us lived at a high and abnormal pitch. Our 
nerves were on edge as are the nerves of profes- 
sional evangelists occasionally. We grew brain 
fagged and I think it is a matter of record that 
sometimes we took naps while our colleagues were 
speaking the same speech we had heard two hundred 
and thirty times twice a day. But if any theatrical 
or political group ever succeeded in closing their 
engagements or campaigns in better physical and 
mental condition we have never heard of it. As 
Governor Hanly said at the last meeting where all 
three divisions met for the final account of the cam: 
paign, “A kind Providence has kept all of us in a 
miraculous way. We are unable to find a reason for 
the astonishing summing up of this experience unless 


160 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


we give the Divine Power the praise for sustaining 
us while we have been engaged in a holy cause.” 

The results of the Flying Squadron experiment 
ought to be told by others rather than by members 
of the organization. ‘The state of Washington 
through its citizens and press announced that the 
Squadron’s visit just before the state election in 
November put the state in the prohibition column. 
Other states made the same announcement of the 
conversion of thousands to the national prohibition 
attitude. Whatever direct or indirect influence the 
campaign may have had, it seems as if there is little 
question that the general result was what Governor 
Hanly anticipated. It stirred into practical action 
an aroused public opinion. The ‘‘event was in the 
hand of God,” and after-history seems to bear out 
the anticipation of victory for national legislation, 
which was predicted at the first meetings held in the 
whisky stronghold of Peoria, and announced again 
at the wonderful closing meeting at Atlantic City. 
In any case, national prohibition is now a part of 
our national policy, and the act making it so will 
never be repealed. If the members of the Squadron 
have reason to believe that their service helped even 
slightly to make it what it is, that is their reward. 
Whatever else may be said about it, again it is true, 
as Governor Hanly predicted, that ‘“The campaign 
had no parallel, and when completed it was without 
precedent.” 


THE STORY OF THE FLYING SQUADRON 161 


The personnel of the Flying Squadron was made 
up of men and women who enlisted without any 
thought of personal gain or public applause. It 
is an honorary roll, and I think it ought to have a 
place in this story. 

Governor J. Frank Hanly, of Indiana. 

Oliver Wayne Stewart, of Illinois. 

Daniel A. Poling, of Massachusetts. 

Ira Landrith, of Tennessee. 

John B. Lewis, of Massachusetts. 

C. N. Howard, of New York. 

Dr. Carolyn E. Geisel, of Michigan. 

Clarence True Wilson, of the District’ of 
Columbia. 

Wilbur F. Sheridan, representing the Epworth 
League Society. 

Eugene W. Chafin, of Arizona. 

Charles M. Sheldon, of Kansas. 

These were the Squadron’s speakers and they 
were not all with the Squadron during its entire 
eight months’ tour. Near the last half of the first 
lap of travel it became evident that the efficiency 
of the meetings would be increased by reducing the 
number of speakers in each division to two instead 
of three which was the number carried at the begin- 
ning. On that account some of the members who 
had joined at the opening of the campaign retired 
or took up outside service. 


162 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


The singers and musicians who served all or part 
of the time the campaign was carried on were: 

Dr. D. V. Poling, of Oregon. | 

Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Butler, of New York. 

William Lowell Patton, of Oregon. 

Miss Vera K. Mullin, of Indiana. 

Miss Iris E. Robinson, of Indiana. 

A large part of the success of the Squadron was 
due to the remarkable work of the secretaries. 
Theirs was the unseen and laborious task of details 
of publicity, and the business of keeping accounts and 
looking after the endless matters that made the 
ofice force back in Indianapolis indispensable. 
Among them were: | 

Mr. Edward E. Mittman, the Executive Secre- 
tary. 

Lewis Hallie McNeil, of Indianapolis. 

Robert S. Henry, of Tennessee. 

Richey S. Middleton, of West Virginia. 

L. Stanley Fellows, of Brooklyn, N. Y. 

Miss Jeanette Zweier, of New York City. 


CHAPTER SEVEN 
THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 


I began my Kansas Ministry in Topeka, on Jan- 
uary 6, 1889, in a room over a meat market, where 
our meetings were all held while the new church 
building was being completed, into which we moved 
six months later. At the first communion held in 
April of that year we numbered just 100 members, 
and I knew nearly all my people by their first names. 
Twenty-five years later when the membership had 
increased to 1,000 members I could not say the 
same, but I often wished I could. 

The first thing I want to say about the church 
is a tribute to the perfect freedom it gave the 
minister. During my entire pastorate of thirty 
years including three years when the people gave 
me leave of absence for outside lecture and con- 
ference work, I doubt if any pastor ever enjoyed 
a greater sense of independence for speech and ac- 
tion than I had. And for that boon I have never 
ceased to feel grateful, for of all things that com- 
bine to make the pastor of a church contented and 
ambitious I do not know of anything that equals 


his knowledge that he is not dominated or re- 
163 


164 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


strained by persons or conditions in the parish that 
place a suspicious or restricted circle about his 
preaching and his parish ministrations. I can truly 
say that for thirty years I never felt for one mo- 
ment the slightest attempt on the part of any of my 
parishioners to interfere with new experiments or 
make theological boundaries for pulpit utterances. 
I do not believe there was ever a freer atmosphere 
granted any minister in any church in America than 
was given to me by my people. 

I have already spoken of some phases of parish 
work and need not enlarge on those plans which were 
tried and sometimes followed up but at other times 
abandoned when the trial proved of no value. But 
I find in tracing the growth of my Kansas church 
life that it falls quite sensibly into three general 
periods,—the building of the church; the adven- 
ture of travel in the interest of reform and church 
development; and the use of writing as a means of 
expressing what I found could not be worked out 
by the sermonic method. 

I can truly say that the building of a church car- 
ries with it more real pleasure and downright joy 
than any other business known to the sons of men. 
At least I believe it does, without ever having car- 
ried on any other business except farming and news- 
paper work. I soon found that the ministry was 
a twofold thing, composed of pulpit and pew. A 
church cannot be built by the minister alone, neither 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 165 


can it be built by the pew alone. It is a codperative 
process, and carries its own reward with it in pro- 
portion to the self-sacrifice and devotion that both 
parties are willing to give to it. 

I have never been able to discover any way to 
separate the pulpit from the parish. Neither have 
I been able to find any way to build a church with- 
out the combined effort of preaching and parish 
labor. A minister cannot preach effectively to his 
people on Sunday unless he knows them and loves 
them on Monday. If there were times (and there 
were many of them) when I felt that my sermons 
did not help any one in the church building, I 
always had a conviction that somehow before an- 
other Sunday came around I would earn my salary 
by helping someone during the week that I had 
missed when I tried to preach to him. 

The church grew in its healthiest way, as the 
years went on, by gradual additions from the Bible 
School. Several months in the year I found myself 
planning Sunday morning sermons for the children. 
Out of those periods came ingatherings of church 
members including children of all ages. If the par- 
ents of children in the parish felt that their children 
understood what the Christian life meant, and what 
church membership meant, not with an adult mind 
but with a child’s mind, we received them into the 
full membership, and there were very few lapses 
as they grew up into the church life. There were 


166 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


some questions about receiving seven-year-old chil- 
dren, but I noticed as the time went on that most of 
these children were more faithful to their church 
vows than most of the older people, including some 
who thought it might not be wise to receive them. 
The regular additions to the membership aver- 
aged 50 a year for twenty years, a majority of the 
accessions coming from the young life in the parish. 
I shall always believe that the most satisfactory 
evangelistic part of a minister’s program will be 
the regular work of making Christians out of his 
own Sunday School members. ‘That in the long run 
will bring memberships into the church body far 
more certainly and with greater permanency than 
special efforts directed to “reach the masses”’ out- 
side. That is not to disparage the work of pro- 
fessional evangelists, but it is simply to express my 
own experience in the work of building up a church. 
Very few churches are built up by evangelistic efforts 
made to reach outsiders. And while the minister 
is only rarely a good evangelist, in the sense that 
he can hold mass evangelistic meetings, all minis- 
ters ought to be able to evangelize their own people 
by regular methods of preaching and teaching. 
When the church was twenty years old it needed 
a new home on account of its growing family. So 
the people made their pledges up to the amount 
necessary to start the building and paid interest on 
borrowed money enough to complete it, and then did 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 167 


as many western churches are in the habit of doing, 
cleared off all indebtedness of every sort about 
seven or eight years after the first pledges were 
made. This was in the spring of the year 1914, that 
memorable year of our Lord and of Mars. 

In the year 1912 the church gave me a leave of 
absence as Minister-at-Large in order to answer 
calls for temperance and conference work in this 
country and abroad, and called to the parish Dr. 
Roy B. Guild who had been one of my boys in 
training. It was during the next three years while 
I was away that the church increased steadily in 
membership and raised the last of its pledges and 
paid off its obligation for full ownership of the 
church building, and it was during that time that 
I met some of the most interesting people, and my 
ministry continued the second stage or period which 
included the travel and adventure of that most fas- 
cinating of all human experiences when human ac- 
quaintance takes account of personalities and begins 
to grasp something of the wonderful story of earth 
life as it becomes a thing of communion with others. 

If I may be permitted at this point to be allowed 
to ignore particular dates as they were recorded on 
the calendar, I want to share with you some of the 
pleasure I received not only during those three 
years when I was permitted to wander from the 
parish bounds out into the wider world, but at times 
before that three-year period when certain persons 


~ 


168 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


became not simply a part of my own history but 
will always remain a definite part of the history 
of very many times and important events, as I 
recall their place in my own meeting with them. So 
what follows is not any formal attempt to make 
careful pen drawings of some most remarkable peo- 
ple, but rather to express as near as I can the im- 
pression made on my own mind and I hope heart 
also by those who will always remain in my memory 
as a part of my church life, because I met most of 
them during the active connection with the parish in 
Topeka. 

There are two men who have influenced the lives 
of more preachers in America than any others, and 
those men are Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips 
Brooks. I never met Beecher to know him per- 
sonally, and saw him only once, in my Senior year at 
Brown University when he lectured in a winter 
course down-town. But during my first year in 
Topeka, I faced a most perplexing problem in my 
church and did not know which way to turn for the 
help I needed. One of the things I missed all 
through my ministry was the personal help I might 
have received from a pastor. The minister is the 
one man in the parish who has none. Neither, in the 
Congregational Church, does he have a bishop. The 
nearest he gets to spiritual adviser is some devoted 
deacon or consecrated member, and even then it is 
not like going to his own minister. So I ventured 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 169 


to write a letter to Phillips Brooks, at that time the 
great preacher at Trinity, Boston. 

He answered my questions immediately and 
helpfully. I prize his reply as one of the most 
precious answers to a most difficult situation that 
I have ever known. The amazing thing about it 
to me was that a man who was so busy, and bound 
by so many duties would take the time to answer 
with his own pen (it was before the days of type- 
writers) the problems of a raw young preacher 
who in a moment of almost despair, turned to him, 
thoughtless of the fact that he had added one more 
to the thousands of others who had turned in their 
need to the same great heart for sympathy and wis- 
dom. Phillips Brooks will always be one of the 
great ones of the earth to me because I learned 
afterwards that he always answered letters like 
mine. ) 

It was only a few months after this that I had 
a letter from the poet Whittier. I had become in- 
volved in a dispute with some working men who 
had been coming to church Sunday evenings, and 
who insisted that the church as an institution was 
aristocratic and worldly and ministered to the rich 
and cared little for the masses. One of these men, 
after a Sunday night when I had preached on the 
Universal Brotherhood, came up, and in what 
seemed to me like an unfair spirit of narrow criti- 
cism charged the church with about every unchristian 


170 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


motive. He was well read, and as we talked he 
quoted Whittier’s lines: 


‘“The church, to place and power the door, 
Rebukes the sins of the world no more, 
Nor sees its Lord in the homeless Poor.” 


“That is a description of your church,” he said 
as we parted that night. “It is condemned by one 
of America’s greatest poets.”’ 

I was passionately devoted to the church as an 
institution. It had always stood in history for me 
as the one thing that was the hope of the world. 
I took as a personal insult to my dearest friend the 
attack of the workingman who stood outside and 
criticized, ignorant of the inner history of an organ- 
ization that was beyond his understanding. But 
the quotation from Whittier troubled me, and after 
a day or two I wrote the poet asking him if he really 
meant by those lines to condemn the church as a 
whole. 

His reply was as simple and clear as his own inner 
life. He wrote; ‘The lines referred to by thy anti- 
church friend were written of the church fifty years 
ago. I believe the church of the present time is com- 
mendably active in deeds of kindness and mercy, 
more and more becoming an example of love to God 
and man.”’ 

This was almost the last letter the poet wrote. 
I cherish it, together with the one from Phillips 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY LT 


Brooks, as a personal voice that spoke good cheer at 
a time when I greatly needed it. But when I 
showed Whittier’s letter to the “‘anti-church friend” 
he simply said, ‘‘Whittier does not know the present 
day church as we do,” meaning by ‘we’ the work- 
ing men that he represented. After that, I stopped 
arguing with people who criticize the church. 

During my ministry I belonged to what was 
known as the Fortnightly Club, a group of business 
and professional men, some twenty-five in number, 
who met twice a month to listen to a paper written 
and read by one of the members and afterwards 
criticized in three-minute talks. To one of these 
meetings we invited Dr. Lyman Abbott at a time 
when he was traveling over the West for the purpose 
of studying the public convictions on great themes. 

The Outlook, of which Dr. Abbott was editor, 
had not believed in prohibition, and indeed had 
criticized its working in the states where it had been 
made a part of the constitutional law. So we in- 
vited him to be our guest one evening and at his 
own request the topic for discussion was the result 
of prohibition in Kansas. 

For nearly three hours we bombarded him with 
facts. The Chief Justice of our Supreme Court, 
Judge Johnston, was a member of the Club and he 
gave Dr. Abbott a most convincing argument for 
prohibition, basing it on his own observation on 
the bench. Every other member spoke with em- 


172 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


phasis on the immense benefits received from the 
law, commercially, socially, and morally. 

After we were through, Dr. Abbott asked a great 
many shrewd questions, and we answered them. 
He did not make any comments, as he said he was 
studying public questions in a receptive mood. But 
as we were going out, after the meeting was over 
he said to me, ‘Prohibition seems to work out here, 
but it would never work in a city like New York. 
It is not practical for large city communities.” 

But before he died, Dr. Abbott in the columns 
of the Outlook championed the cause of national 
prohibition, and I am sure he finally came to the 
conclusion that any good law can be as well enforced 
in a large city as in a small one. As a matter of 
fact the prohibitory law is no more disobeyed in 
New York than some other laws, and the national 
prohibitory law has taken out of politics the saloon 
and all that went with its blasting influence. 

During one year of travel I spoke for Christian 
Endeavor in over one hundred cities in America and 
Canada. And among all the persons I met at that 
time none so impressed me with his simple common 
sense and earnestness as Dr. Francis E. Clark, the 
President of that world-wide organization. I 
traveled very many miles with him, was often a 
guest in his home and had the rare privilege of being 
often on the same speaking platform with him. His 
genial, modest, kindly spirit will always rest like a 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 173 


benediction on the millions of young hearts he has 
blest, but on none of them I believe more than on 
my own. He was a most wonderful fellow 
traveler, and the history of the church will give him 
an honored and great place among its builders and 
teachers. 

In the three years’ absence from the church while 
I was speaking under the rather wide sounding title 
of ‘‘Minister-at-Large,” it was a rare privilege to 
meet very many delightful people. I often wish 
I had kept a note book or address book at that 
time, but my habits in that direction have always 
been failures. I start out bravely, buy a handsome 
address book, inscribe my own name and address in 
it, put down the date and place of my first lecture 
engagement, make one or two uninteresting remarks 
about the town and then either lose the book or lose 
my interest in it. So all I have left from travel 
experience and personal acquaintance must come out 
of the pages of memory, illustrated now and then 
with such letters as the letter writers would be will- 
ing to have read. In giving one of these now, I am 
wondering what it was I talked about in Santa Rosa, 
California, that night. I must confess I do not recall 
the subject or the manner of its presentation and 
would give a good deal to be able to duplicate both 
if the impressions made upon my kindly critic were 
indeed merited. 

I reached Santa Rosa early in the forenoon, and 


174 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS, LIFE STORY 


was free until the evening. The only man I had 
ever heard of who lived in Santa Rosa was Luther 
Burbank. I had been eating some of his thin-shelled 
English walnuts on the train coming up from San 
Francisco and hoped I might be able to see him and 
tell him what I thought of them. So I walked over 
to his place, which was right on the edge of the 
town, and asked a man who was working in the 
corner spineless-cactus garden if Mr. Burbank was 
at home. 

He said I would find him over in a field, point- 
ing in the direction of it. I walked down through 
several interesting garden spots and finally came 
upon Mr. Burbank who was down on his knees doing 
something with the soil into which he had plunged 
his hands, and then letting the fine dust of it trickle 
through his fingers. He wore an old and ragged 
pair of dirty white overalls, and a dirtier brown 
shirt, while his head was partly covered with a 
very disreputable straw hat that looked as if a horse 
had bitten a mouthful out of the front side, and then 
tried to put it back. 

I introduced myself and told him what I thought 
of his walnuts, and his eye gleamed through the 
honest coating of dirt that ornamented his eye- 
brows, and he got up and insisted on taking me into 
the house, when I would much have preferred to 
walk over the grounds. Before going in, he did 
point out a walnut tree that he had made to grow 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 175 


some marvelous size in a miraculous period of 
time, but aside from that he did not talk of his own 
methods, and I had only a general conversation 
with him. He asked some questions about Kansas 
and said it was indebted for some of its best citizens 
to his own native state of Massachusetts, which 1s 
true. He asked about the lecture of the evening 
which was to be given in a church, and volunteered 
the information that he seldom went to hear lec- 
tures, although I had not said anything about it, 
except to answer his questions. 

In the evening when I was about half through 
with my lecture I noticed Mr. Burbank sitting near 
the back of the house. I had not expected to see 
him at all, and as he did not look as he did when I 
first met him, I did not recognize him until I had 
been speaking for some time. I did not see him 
after the lecture, and never expected to have more 
than the memory of that little visit in his old square 
brick house, but several weeks later after getting 
home from a tour of the Pacific coast I received a 
letter and his photograph, one taken with smooth 
face and a white tie and dressed-up clothes. I ven- 
ture to quote the letter entire, and hope I may be 
forgiven for letting someone else besides the Lecture 
Bureau agent say it: 


“Tt was a great pleasure to meet you in my home 
and to hear your great talk in the evening, and to 


176 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


know that you are one of those who has courage to 
speak as he believes on all subjects without excep- 
tion. Such men are needed. Your quiet straight- 
forward words could be heard distinctly by everyone 
in the building. I have often wondered why one 
needed to bellow, paw the earth, pierce the air with 
shrieks, and raise the Devil in order to praise the 
Lord. Always faithfully yours, Luther Burbank.” 


That last sentence has been ever since worth more 
to me than a course in declamation by a professional 
spellbinder. 

Once during this travel period I yielded in a 
moment of weakness to the Chautauqua man, and 
went on a circuit that included southern Indiana, a 
part of Illinois, and Iowa. I can frankly say it 
was an experience I do not care to duplicate. It 
happened to be the hottest summer for several 
years. If there is any hotter place than a Chautau- 
qua tent in southern Indiana at corn-growing time I 
have never been introduced to it by my worst enemy. 
And if there is any more forlorn thing than a hotel in 
some of the small Chautauqua towns of the Middle 
West where the accommodations are the only things 
that are beyond mention I have never met it, not 
even in camping out with the flea-infested Sioux 
Indians up on the Niobrara. 

But the one pleasant memory of that misguided 
ambition of mine to make a Chautauqua circuit was 





STEWART SHELDON 
FATHER AND SON. IQI5. 





SARAH WARD SHELDON 
THE MOTHER OF CHARLES M. SHELDON. 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 177 


the meeting with William Jennings Bryan. A meet- 
ing with Mr. Bryan was interesting at any time, but 
to be with him on a Chautauqua platform and watch 
him in action was more than interesting, it was fas- 
cinating. ‘The first thing he did down there in In- 
diana was to tell the janitor or the boy or whoever 
happened to be near to get him a pitcher of ice 
water with some ice in it. Then he would pour a 
quart of it over his wrists which were unadorned 
with cuffs, and call for another pitcher. This he 
directed to be placed on the table. After getting 
into action I have seen him drink nearly a pitcher 
of ice water in between the applauses which were 
frequent and fervid. It was a marvel to me to 
see a thing that would have put me on an operating 
table only get up more steam in Mr. Bryan. His 
voice grew more mellow and more clear with every 
gulp of ice water, as his collar disappeared and his 
hair seemed to leak the drops that the pitcher pro- 
vided. In addition to all this inspiring and per- 
spiring spectacle he was the most genial fellow 
lecturer, with a fund of humor and anecdote that 
never seemed to care about concealing anything that 
belonged to American politics. He told me the 
second time I met him that his break with Mr. 
Wilson when he went out of his cabinet was abso- 
lutely unavoidable if he, Mr. Bryan, was to retain 
his self-respect and continue to be a free voice in 


178 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


policies which were to him the very breath of life 
itself. | 

Since that Chautauqua experience I have had 
many meetings with Mr. Bryan, notably at Wash- 
ington during the Limitation of Arms Conference 
where I was indebted to him for many courtesies. 
I do not agree with him on some matters of theology 
and world history, but that does not have anything 
to do with my love for him and respect for him. 
One does not have to agree with a man’s theology 
to love his religion. 

It is some distance from southern Indiana to Fifth 
Avenue, New York, and from Mr. Bryan (theo- 
logically) to Harry Emerson Fosdick, the so-called 
heretic of the Baptist-Presbyterian pulpit. As my 
travel circle went around I finally found it inter- 
secting Dr. Fosdick’s circle and it meant meeting a 
most interesting and personally attractive man. It 
is very significant to note that personality is a thing 
that seems to be separated in many ways from a 
man’s creeds and beliefs. I have noted many times 
that persons one meets are not at all like the reports 
of them made by people who have never seen them. 
I have had several letters from people severely 
condemning Dr. Fosdick. One of them said he was 
the most dangerous man in New York and America. 
I enjoyed that letter so much that I sent it to Dr. 
Fosdick, because he has a good fund of humor, and 
I felt sure it would cheer him up on a blue Monday. 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 179 


I am sure it did, for the following Sunday I had 
the pleasure of hearing him preach in the pulpit of 
the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue, and 
I have never heard a more impressive Gospel ser- 
mon in my life than I heard that day. 

This being a very rambling and discursive chapter 
as is fitting for a travel chapter I want to share 
with you the pleasure of meeting some of the people 
of Great Britain. Three different times the church 
in Topeka gave me leave of absence to engage in 
Prohibition campaigns in England. During these 
campaigns the most interesting part of them to me 
was the personal friendship that the campaigns fur- 
nished. 

The most picturesque figure in any British pulpit 
for many generations was Dr. Joseph Parker of the 
Temple on High Holborn. He was in every sense 
of the word, a “‘character.’”’ He was a remarkable 
preacher, most astonishing writer and exceedingly 
and distinctly himself. 

I happened to be in his congregation one Sunday 
when I had no speaking engagements. It was Com- 
munion Sunday. Dr. Parker sat down on the small 
platform below the pulpit and after the officers had 
begun to pass the bread, he asked any visitors who 
might be present to send up their cards to him. 
Several American tourists were present and as [ 
noted them giving their cards to the ushers, [ 
handed in mine, not knowing what use the preacher 


180 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


would make of them, as the custom was one I had 
never seen before at a Communion service. 

Dr. Parker sat there reading out names of visitors 
as the ushers brought them up, in a running com- 
mentary as it were, to introduce them to the con- 
gregation. He read my card out loud, and said 
in his most impressive pulpit manner, ‘“‘I would like 
to see Dr. Sheldon in my study at the close of this 
service.” I felt somewhat like a small boy who has 
been asked by the teacher to remain after school for 
a few minutes, but I went into the study, and my 
heart warmed to the most genial and friendly wel- 
come that any man ever had. If the English people 
have a reputation for being stiff and cold and un- 
gracious they certainly did not get it from Dr. 
Parker. He invited me out to his home at Hamp- 
stead Heath the next day and I went and had a most 
interesting afternoon. He showed me the proofs 
of his new People’s Bible, which contained his pulpit 
comments on his own Bible Readings, one of which 
I remember was nothing more than this: ‘And 
Moses fell on his face and worshipped.” The 
comment on this verse was, “Under the circum- 
stances, there was nothing else that Moses could 
do!” 

I met Dr. Charles F. Aked in his famous Pem- 
broke Chapel Church in Liverpool, during the Boer 
war. Dr. Aked bravely and from the pulpit re- 
peatedly attacked the government for this war, and 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 181 


was as bitterly hated by the Jingoes for his attitude 
as he was admired by the peace party. One Sun- 
day after he had preached tremendously against the 
wickedness of the war, the hoodlums attacked him 
as he was leaving the church, and he barely escaped 
serious physical injury. Mrs. Sheldon and I were 
his guests for several weeks after that and the 
scars were still visible on his furniture where the 
rocks thrown through his front windows by the hood- 
lums had left their mark. The Sunday following 
this personal attack Dr. Aked preached his most 
vigorous sermon against the war. The one Sunday 
I was privileged to be in his pulpit, at the evening 
service before I spoke, he said to me when time 
came for the announcement of a hymn, “I am going 
to give out Kipling’s Recessional. ‘The house is 
full of Jingoes, and they hate this hymn. Watch 
them sing it.” I watched them, and I can truly say 
that I have never seen a grimmer sight than several 
hundred Militaristic Britishers, red faced and glum, 
fiercely grasping their hymn books and looking 
straight forward with tight shut lips as the rest 
of the congregation who sympathized with Dr. Aked 
sang the whole of Kipling’s Recessional, no stanzas 
being omitted. The Recessional invokes the Deity, 
“Lest we forget,’ and for one I shall never forget 
that scene in Pembroke Chapel, and neither will the 
Jingoes who were present. 

At the time of the World’s Christian Endeavor 


182 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Convention in London, President Clark and myself 
received a cablegram from Chicago asking if he 
would accept the nomination for the Presidential 
candidate of the Christian Socialist party that had 
been organized there if I would be his running mate! 
Dr. Clark and I had a hasty caucus together and 
cabled over at a cost to us both, evenly divided, of 
eight shillings and ten pence, the one word, “No!” 
asking the telegraph man to spell it with a capital 
N. I think it was that curious bit of American poli- 
tics that attracted Mr. William T. Stead’s attention 
to us, for a few days later, after the announcement 
of our refusal to run for president and vice-president 
had been published in the London papers, Mr. 
Stead invited us with a number of other American 
visitors to take an excursion at his expense up the 
_ Thames as far as Henley, and stop at Windsor on 
the way. 

We went up the river on a launch, and had an 
elaborate banquet at Windsor in the Town Hall, 
and then drove through Windsor Park. The Union 
Jack was flying from the tower of Windsor Castle 
showing that the Queen was in residence, and as we 
neared the Castle entrance Stead said to Dr. Clark 
and me in the casual way in which he spoke of 
crowned heads, “‘Would you like to see the Old 
Lady?” meaning, without any disrespect, Queen 
Victoria. 

I do not remember what Dr. Clark said, but I 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 183 


managed to make some remark about not having any 
court dress on in which to appear before royalty. 
But Stead went up to the palace entrance, was ad- 
mitted, and after some little time came back looking 
somewhat crestfallen, and said that the “Old Lady” 
was not well, and could not receive any visitors, 
although she sent her greetings to the American vis- 
itors. And that is as near as I ever came to meeting 
a crowned head face to face, except the one time 
when Mrs. Sheldon and I had an audience with 
Queen Liliuokalani in Honolulu after she had been 
requested to abdicate. But it was an astonishing 
thing to me then and is always to think that Stead 
was the one man almost in all Europe who seemed 
to have a free entrance to royal abodes and the 
privilege of gaining personal interviews with the 
most exclusive royal potentates, including the most 
seclusive court of Austria and that of St. Peters- 
burg. And he was not a man of title, only a journal- 
ist and man of letters, a free lance if there ever was 
one, and on that day when he wanted to know if we 
would like to see Queen Victoria he had been out 
of Holloway prison only a few weeks for telling the 
truth about the awful immoral condition of her 
Majesty’s capital city. 

Going on up to Henley that afternoon Stead dis- 
coursed on his pet subject of telepathy and told us 
that he talked daily with his sister who at the time 
was living in Paris. He also said that when he died 


184 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


he would find some way to communicate with his 
friends here. He went down on the Titanic April 
I5, 1912, and if any message has ever come from 
him to any living being on earth I have never heard 
of it. Before we parted that memorable day he 
presented each one of us with an autographed photo- 
graph of himself, and his own printed motto, 


‘“* For the union of all who love, 
In the service of all who suffer.” 


And again while it is possible to enumerate a long 
list of possible places of departure from acceptance 
of William T. Stead’s creed and practice, I shall 
always put his picture on the wall of my travel room 
as that of a gallant gentleman whose heart beat 
high and true for every form of release from in- 
justice and who scorned cowardice and ease of living 
when human wrongs waited to be redressed. 

On the second of my prohibition campaigns to 
Great Britain I had the pleasure of meeting Lord 
Kinnaird who was one of the few members of the 
House of Lords who was an ardent national pro- 
hibitionist. “The evening we were his guests at St. 
James Square, London, he had just come from a 
session of the Lords where they had been debating 
the measure which had passed the House of Com- 
mons granting the British householder the great 
privilege of local veto, that is, of saying at the ballot 
box whether he would have a saloon in his town or 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 185 


not. Up to the present time the English people 
have not had what we have always had, the right to 
vote the public house out of existence. It would 
take an act of Parliament to give them that right. 
Lord Kinnaird pleaded for this right with all his 
consecrated Scottish convictions, but a few days 
afterwards the House of Lords kicked the bill out 
with a kick that had behind it the indignant refusal 
of more than a score of Brewers who hold seats in 
the noble House of Lords of the great British Em- 
pire. But Lord Kinnaird’s soul was clean of the 
thing, and he made me feel as I kneeled in F. B. 
Meyers’ church one evening and heard Kinnaird 
pray for the power of Christ to baptize his country 
with another Pentecost, that there was a leaven in 
the lump that some day would mean a prohibition 
English speaking race around the world. 

Lady Somerset was another of the noble repre- 
sentatives of the best among the rich and titled of 
Great Britain. I was deeply impressed with her 
wonderful sincerity and admired greatly her power 
on the platform, and her simple manner of living. 

Perhaps one of the most enjoyable experiences 
of one of the journeys to England during the travel 
period was the meeting with Dean Farrar at Can- 
terbury. Mrs. Sheldon and I spent several days 
in the Deanery, including a memorable Sunday. The 
old structure was so full of winding stair cases and 
crooked passages that a servant had to pilot us to 


186 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


our room and show us how to get out again to find 
the dining and reception rooms down stairs. The 
Dean had invited considerable company to meet us, 
and at the table he and the others invited facts about 
the working of prohibition in the States. Dean 
Farrar was an ardent temperance man and during 
his incumbency at St. Margaret’s, London, as Arch- 
deacon, he incurred the enmity of the social leaders 
among the brewers in his congregation on account 
of his outspoken sermons and addresses. During 
the Sunday after he had preached in the Cathedral 
in the morning he gently said that the rules of his 
church forbade his inviting me to preach in Canter- 
bury Cathedral, as he would wish it did not, but 
he had invited the Cathedral Choir boys to come into 
the old Roman walled garden of the Deanery in 
the afternoon and invited me to speak to them there, 
which I did, to my own great delight as I faced their 
fair faces in that surrounding seated on the English 
lawn that was like heaviest velvet, with the old red 
brick wall surrounding the pear trees that trained 
over it more like vines than trees, and the pervading 
scent of roses everywhere. At night on that same 
Sunday just as the Cathedral clock was booming the 
midnight hour, the old watchman making his rounds 
with his lantern could be heard calling out the sing- 
song sentence, ‘‘Twelve o'clock, and all’s well!” 
It took us back at least as far as Shakespeare, and 
a part of it to Julius Cesar, and while I do not 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 187 


have any too much reverence or use for a dead past, 
which was not any better than it ought to be, and 
not as good as the present which is not as good as 
it might be, the surroundings of the Deanery at 
Canterbury had a charm that newness cannot have. 
It is not every Sunday in the year that a Kansas 
preacher can preach to a group of Cathedral choir 
boys in a garden that has a wall built by men some 
of whom must have seen the Roman legions march- 
ing down to take their triremes to make passage 
across the channel for imperial Rome. 

During the War of 1914 and 1918 I was in- 
vited by the National Prohibition Party of Great 
Britain to join speakers from Canada and other 
countries and hold prohibition meetings all over 
Great Britain. It seemed then and does now rather 
strange that a campaign of that nature was called 
during the carrying on of the war. Later in the 
conflict, the British government forbade such cam- 
paigns. But the need of something of the sort has 
never been questioned by those who understood the 
conditions that faced our boys as they landed and 
went up to London preparatory to going over to 
France. I do not dare to tell all I saw of the effects 
of drink on our own boys while they were en route 
through England for the front, but what I did see 
convinced me that the campaign was not wasted, 
and the leaders in it have never apologized for it or 
minimized its influence. 


188 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


The church again granted me the leave of absence 
and I went in the winter of 1917 and 1918. The 
leader in the National Prohibition movement for 
Great Britain was Sir George Hunter the great ship 
builder of Newcastle-on-Tyne. He was the designer 
and builder of the Mauretania and Lusitania, the 
latter being built on the Clyde and the former at 
Newcastle-on-T'yne. I was his guest for two weeks 
and of all my English friends I think of him with 
the greatest respect and affection. He was a mem- 
ber of the church of England and a most ardent 
prohibitionist. At several of our meetings I have 
heard him castigate the clergy of the State Church 
for their financial connections with the breweries, 
and at the great meeting in Bristol near the close of 
our campaign he turned to face nearly a thousand 
clergymen of the state church and gave them the 
most thorough tongue lashing for their failure to 
help the cause of temperance that I have ever heard 
even from temperance agitators like Francis Mur- 
phy and John B. Gough. 

Sir George started the financing of the campaign 
by giving outright two thousand pounds nearly all of 
which was spent in advertising the meetings. They 
were put on the map and the executive work was 
carried on by a young Canadian by the name of 
Newton Wylie of Toronto, who was incapacitated 
for military service by an accident to his spine which 
made him a cripple. He raised over 10,000 pounds 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 189 


to meet all expenses, and closed the account without 
any debt. We went into 75 towns in two months 
and spoke to immense audiences. During the two 
months in London and Leeds and Liverpool and 
Manchester I saw American and Canadian and Aus- 
tralian boys drunk on the streets, and at Plymouth 
the crews of three of our battle ships lay drunk 
in the streets for nearly a week, and the authorities 
including the ministers of the churches made public 
protests to the liquor men to stop debauching the 
soldiers and sailors of the Allies. It did very little 
good, as the brewers were on top during the war, 
but the sight of the boys was enough to break the 
heart, and did break the heart of hundreds and even 
thousands in Canada. ‘The records given to the 
House of Commons show that over 10,000 Can- 
adian soldiers and sailors were invalided home from 
Cairo, Egypt, on account of drink and venereal 
disease, and the number incapacitated in Great 
Britain for the same reasons was up into the thou- 
sands. In the public houses all over England and 
Scotland were printed notices in the windows, ‘‘Men 
in uniform served here to whisky and brandy. 
Others to beer only.” I was in Liverpool on New 
Year’s eve 1918 just before the Leviathan came in 
with her first consignment of our boys and the pub- 
lic houses were running over with drunken and 
drinking soldiers. As fast as the drunken were 
unable to buy any more they were pulled out of the 


199 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


rooms in order to permit the entrance of those yell- 
ing outside to get in. 

On my departure for home in January I carried 
with me a letter from Sir George Hunter addressed 
to President Wilson and Cabinet members of the 
United States asking and pleading for some action 
to be taken to protect the American soldiers from 
drink while passing through Great Britain for 
France. Lloyd George was quoted in his famous 
speech made at the beginning of the war, “We face 
three enemies, Germany, Austria and Drink, and the 
greatest of these is Drink.” Sir George urged me 
by pen and voice to see if something could not be 
done at Washington. 

On landing at New York the middle of January 
I went at once to Washington and asked to see first 
of all Herbert Hoover. The wheat we had been 
sending over, and the barley for English consump- 
tion were being converted into beer, instead of bread. 
I found Mr. Hoover at the end of a day of dis- 
traction. It was already getting dark in the long 
wooden building where he had his office. As I had 
come down by the White House I bought a small 
bunch of sweet peas from a little flower shop and 
when Mr. Hoover asked me to come in and tell him 
what my coming was about I first gave him the 
flowers and as he took them he said, “I get mostly 
bricks. ‘This looks to me like a pleasant change.” 
I told him as concisely as I could what I had seen 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 191 


and asked him, after I had delivered Sir George’s 
message, what could be done for our boys to protect 
them. 

For reply he showed me a cable demanding a 
heavier shipment of grain to the forces in Great 
Britain. And then he expressed himself in vigorous 
English over a policy that permitted the turning of 
good food into bad drink. And I told him of a case 
that I had personally seen in Northumberland while 
I was there of a prohibition farmer who had been 
arrested for feeding his barley to his pigs instead of 
selling it to the brewers. He said the army needed 
pork more than beer. But he was tried by a court 
of magistrates and made to pay a fine of twenty- 
five pounds for breaking an English law that com- 
pelled every British farmer to sell the first grade 
barley to the brewers and keep out the second grade 
for bread. 

Mr. Hoover was a worn out man when I saw 
him. He was going to take a week end rest, but 
as we sat there together alone in that war made 
office I could not help wondering at the way he had 
borne the burdens of a dozen men, hating war with 
all his soul, and tormented by a thousand unjust 
criticisms from men and papers that could not have 
held down an assistant corporal’s job, and I went 
away after an assurance that something would be 
done if it was within possibility. It is a fact that 
much of our grain to Great Britain was afterwards 


192 CHARLES. M. SHELDON: HIS ‘LIFE STORY 


sent in the form of flour instead of grain. If that 
change was due to Mr. Hoover’s answer to Sir 
George’s appeal, it was no more than I would expect 
from the man who fed starving Europe in its terrible 
tragedy. 

I went from Mr. Hoover the next day to Secre- 
tary Newton Baker. Senator Dillingham of Ver- 
mont, a near relative of Mrs. Sheldon, helped me 
to an audience with Mr. Baker. He gave me a 
silent but close hearing to my story and showed 
appreciation of the appeal from the maker of the 
Lusitania but when the matter was broached of ask- 
ing Great Britain to observe the same rule in the 
army and navy that we had and asking them to 
refuse liquor to our men as they refused here under 
penalty, Mr. Baker said decidedly “‘We cannot inter- 
fere with the internal policy of Great Britain in a 
matter of that sort.” 

I shall always be convinced that we not only were 
justified in asking Great Britain to protect our boys 
from drink but that we had a right to demand it, 
and that Lloyd George would have welcomed it as a 
just demand. But Mr. Baker did not think so. He 
dismissed me rather abruptly, but the room was full 
of people waiting to see him, and the burden of the 
war was on what looked to me boyish shoulders. 
But before I went away he advised me to see Mr. 
Josephus Daniels the Secretary of the Navy and 
gave me a note to him. 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 193 


I went over at once and had an immediate audi- 
ence with Mr. Daniels. He gave me nearly an 
hour to tell of what [had seen. At the end of it he 
expressed himself with much vigor, indeed a disin- 
terested spectator might have imagined he was say- 
ing some things about the stupid policy of a govern- 
ment that deliberately put its own soldiers and sail- 
ors and those of the Allies out of service in order to 
keep alive an industry like brewing that did more 
harm to civilization than any other one thing in it. 
But when it came to doing anything, that was an- 
other matter, and the Secretary did not know what 
could be done. 

I did not try to see Mr. Wilson, although Sir 
George Hunter had begged me to see the Head of 
the nation. I dared not intrude on him at such a 
time, and went home after seeing my own senators 
and congressmen, but with the feeling that no one 
could or would do anything in the matter. 

The first thing I did after the first greetings at 
home was to put down in writing some of the facts 
I had accumulated from my travel, and then I sent 
a summary of it to Secretary Daniels, and asked him 
if it would be in order to publish them. He replied 
at once, “I hope that your article will have the 
widest publication. I shall look out for it.” I sent 
the article to Hamilton Holt of the New York In- 
dependent. He wrote that the publishing of the 
facts about the British treatment of our boys might 


194 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


jeopardize the invitation he had just had from the 
British authorities to visit the battle front to obtain 
certain facts about the carrying on of affairs, but he 
would publish the article and take the consequences. 
Which he did, and his invitation was not withdrawn, 
and he did valuable service in the matter that after- 
wards took him over. | 

I cannot help wondering how long it will take the 
English speaking world to treat the whole liquor 
business as crime against itself, it would be a rash 
judgment that would dare prophesy the end of the 
liquor trade within the next generation. Great 
Britain is its strongest fort. But forts that have 
been called impregnable have capitulated. Some- 
times they have been captured on account of traitors 
within the walls. The hope of the world lies in that 
perhaps. The thing is so bad that its very badness 
will in the long run destroy it. 

This is such a rambling chapter already that it 
would spoil it to try to make it logical and con- 
nected. It all covers a period that was a distinct 
part of my ministry and at the heart of all of the 
experiences and personal adventure, the church was 
there, the main thing as the years passed on. Com- 
ing back from the third absence abroad I had taken 
up my regular pulpit and parish program again when 
one day I was asked by Governor Ed Hoch to come 
down to the State House to see him on what he 
said was a matter of importance. I soon found that 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 195 


what he wanted was my acceptance of the position 
of Superintendent of the Hutchinson Reformatory, 
a state institution that received young men who were 
convicted for a felony the first time. It had at the 
time some 700 inmates. The Governor urged my 
acceptance and seemed to think it was my duty to 
undertake the task of administering the affairs of the 
Reformatory. But the thought of it compared 
with the work of the ministry in a church simply 
confirmed my choice of the ministry, and I knew 
I was acting wisely when I declined to leave the 
church. The same feeling was present with me 
when the Presbyterian church at Stratford, just out 
of London, asked me to come over there. The de- 
cision to remain in the Topeka parish was deter- 
mined by the conviction that very few transfers of 
that character have ever been happy or successful. 
One had better stay in an environment to which he 
is accustomed and with people who are familiar with 
his peculiarities than attempt what would be in 
reality more of an experiment than a program. 

The period of writing which I have said seemed 
to divide with the church building and the travel 
periods the time of my Kansas ministry was in 
reality distributed over the thirty-five years of 
church life. I found that sermonic preparation 
reached a limited number of hearers, and the printed 
page many more. I would advise every minister 
to write a great deal for the mental change and 


196 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


relief from one form of thought expression. Many 
young ministers in small towns could with great 
advantage to themselves and the broadening of their 
influence make friends with the local newspaper man, 
and through the columns of his county or home 
paper reach a large audience. A good example of 
this is the Rev. Harlow S. Mills of the village of 
Benzonia, Michigan. For many years he has writ- 
ten a column for the local paper and his simple 
message which contains happy philosophy and sound 
advice is read every week by every subscriber in the 
county. I have known some ministers in small 
towns to complain that their parishes were so limited 
on account of other denominations or on account of 
the very smallness of the place itself. But they have 
never tried to enlarge their scope through the 
printed page. Every minister ought to write out 
in full at least one sermon a month, and practice 
writing often for his own accuracy of statement. I 
found also a real mental relief to turn from the 
sermonic and homiletic style of sermon preparation 
to the story form. I also think it lies within the 
reach of any man whose business in life is expressing 
thought in speech to learn to do the same thing for | 
print, and thus enlarge his parish and remove the 
feeling of limitation of one’s audience as confined to 
the numbers that he faces from the pulpit. 

But there is another reason for the use of writing 
apart from the relief from the didactic or sermonic 


THE TOPEKA MINISTRY 197 


style, and that is the enlarged range of subjects that 
can be treated in a story form as compared with the 
sermon form. It is true that the love chapter of 
life can be told in a sermon and preached from a 
pulpit, but not with the freedom possible in a story, 
or by the use of fiction to illustrate the theme. The 
sermon, in the nature of its composition is restricted 
to the conduct of the human in his relation to God 
and his neighbor. The evolution of this theme may 
take the preacher very far afield, but it is necessarily 
limited in the use of incident and adventure. The 
story form allows of more latitude and the listener 
expects more detail than would be allowed to a 
sermon without the criticism that the matter is being 
“lugged” in to fit the text. Whether I am right 
in this philosophy of the story for teaching certain 
vital things like love and the social side of life, it 
has at any rate been a great relief to my mental 
needs to turn from the sermon to the story form 
of teaching. 

I wrote my first book, “Richard Bruce” in 1891 
in order to say some things I wanted my young peo- 
ple to learn, as I found I could not make the same 
appeal by preaching with a sermon and a text. The 
other books followed for the same reason and I 
enjoyed that part of the Sunday evenings more than 
my audiences did. The writing and the reading be- 
came a part of my church life for more than twenty- 
five years, and some thirty stories grew up within 


198 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


that time. The work of the Every-day Bible was 
the result of spare evenings continuing for a space 
of over twenty years, and the later books have been 
a part of my regular work on the Christian Herald. 
Taken in all, my writing has in a certain sense been 
diversion as well as serious work. ‘The diversion 
has rested my mental labor, and I hope it has also 
been at times the vehicle of some needed teaching 
along the way of life which is sometimes a way of 
flowers beside the dusty road over which we all 
travel, permitted by Him who leads the way to 
stop and rest awhile by the wayside which has been 
worn by the tread of His feet because He has led 
so many over the path which leads to everlasting 


life. 


CHAPTER EIGHT 
THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 


Professional globe trotters can skip this chapter, 
as it will probably be uninteresting to them. Com- 
pared with their experiences mine have been tame 
and uneventful. I have had few adventures and 
never scaled a mountain or crawled out of a train 
wreck. But my travel time has been interesting in- 
stead of exciting and eventful enough to relieve the 
traveler from stupid weariness. So I am going to 
say something about it because it is a part of my life 
that is bound up with people and events that are 
important enough to be recorded in this history. 

My travels on this globe up to date have included 
the United States, into every one of which I have 
gone on nearly every railroad system of the country, 
and into every capital city of every state; Great 
Britain, four times, by which I mean England, Ire- 
land, Scotland, Wales, The Isle of Man, the Isle of 
Wight, the Channel Islands, Guernsey and Jersey; 
France, as far as Paris and the Tuileries; Norway, 
including the Sogne Fiord, the Sogne Hardanger, 


and the Balholm district; Australia; New Zealand; 
199 


200 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Hawaii; Samoa including our own little Island 
Tutuila; and Canada. 

The first time I went to Great Britain I lived in 
a garret of a house on Norfolk street off the Strand. 
I rode all over London on the horse busses, which 
have been succeeded by the electric trams. I walked 
all over the city also, much of the walking at night 
through the East end. I feel better acquainted with 
London than with most cities in this country. Sun- 
days I went to church services all day, beginning with 
the first service in St. Pauls or Westminster Abbey, 
and hearing such men as Jackson Wray of Totten- 
ham Court Road, Spurgeon of the famous Taber- 
nacle, Joseph Parker of the Temple, Canon Liddon 
of St. Pauls and F. B. Meyer of Christ Church 
across the Thames. During the other trips to Great 
Britain I was speaking every day in a new town 
and could not enjoy the experience apart from the 
program, but the beauties of the landscape in all 
parts of the old country appealed to me constantly, 
and the meeting with persons of whom I had read 
and heard was a constant delight that not even the 
strain of meetings and public introductions by for- 
midable committees could quite impair. 

Let me tell you of one notable meeting with one 
of Great Britain’s great souls, as a typical event 
in the travel over the old country, one out of very 
many that I hope to enjoy in that other land where 
travel will be without the bother and anxiety of 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 201 


luggage or expense or previous careful laying out 
of itinerary. 

On my second visit to England, Canon Farrar 
who had made such a wonderful impression on 
London as the preacher at St. Margaret’s and on 
the world as an author, had been made Dean of 
Canterbury Cathedral. Mrs. Sheldon and myself 
were honored with an invitation to spend a week 
end with the Dean and Mrs. Farrar at the Deanery. 
We arrived just in time for dinner at seven, and as 
we drove through the gates of the old Roman wall 
built before the birth of Christ, surrounding the 
Deanery and the famous King’s Boys School we felt 
as if we had left the noisy world outside and had 
entered sacred ground. 

The old Deanery is several hundred years old, a 
rambling building gray with years, with long wind- 
ing hallways leadings to sleeping rooms, a few 
steps up to one room to one floor or down to an- 
other, making it a genuine puzzle to the visitor to 
find his own sleeping apartment. Indeed we had 
to have a guide in the form of one of the many 
servants in the Deanery to show us the way and the 
‘aoe sight the Dean himself directed us when it was 
time to retire or we could not have found the place. 

We were met at the door of the Deanery, on our 
arrival by the Dean, clad in the costume of his 
ecclesiastical rank, knee breeches, silk stockings, silk 
vestment, gold buckles on his gaiters, and black 


202 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


apron. Mrs. Farrar was also very quaint in a full 
silk skirt, with beautiful white lace at the neck. 
There were several other guests at dinner, including 
the Bishop of South America, and a number of 
curates. 

The dining room, or rather Banqueting Hall was 
imposing with high paneling of oak grown dark with 
age, and the walls were covered with wonderful 
paintings of past bishops and church notables 
framed in heavy gilt. At one end of this dining 
hall was a reading stand for the Bible, and at break- 
fast the next morning the Dean stood before it 
while all the servants came in to listen to morning 
prayers, the guests and all the company kneeling at 
their chairs while the prayers were said. 

Dean Farrar himself was a teetotaller, and a 
staunch advocate of prohibition, so when we found 
several kinds of wine served at the meals to his 
guests we realized that the drinking habits of old 
England are so long established that even a man 
who had made a record in England for the abolish- 
ing of drink from his own country could not be so 
inhospitable in his own home as to withhold it 
from his guests at his own table. Perhaps he 
did more than any other clergyman of the Estab- 
lished Church while he was in London to call atten- 
tion to the curse of drink and the stories he told at 
his table while the guests were drinking, of his 
visits to the homes of London drunkards and the 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 203 


effect of the parents’ drunkenness on the children 
would have turned a heart of stone, but seemed to 
have little effect on some of the clerical guests who 
had their glasses filled more than once by the butler 
and his assistants. I think the only persons at the 
table during our stay at the Deanery who did not 
drink claret and wine were the Dean and Mrs. 
Farrar and Mrs. Sheldon and myself. 

I have mentioned this visit to Canterbury else- 
where in this story, but these items are additional, 
and remind me of similar visits with the English 
people during my third campaign for prohibition 
under the auspices of the United Kingdom Alliance, 
an organization which has held countless meetings 
all over Great Britain, in the interest of prohibition 
and local option, with results that are hardly meas- 
urable if we are to take into account the effect the 
campaigns have had on the power of the Brewer and 
Distiller, and the lessening of drink among the peo- 
ple generally. For at this writing ten years after 
the Great War, the increase in drunkenness among 
the women in Great Britain is almost double what 
it was three years ago. 

Among the devoted champions of temperance that 
I met on my third visit were Lady Henry Somerset, 
and Lord Kinnaird. Both of these were passion- 
ately in earnest for a sober England, and yet the 
evening I was Lord Kinnaird’s guest at his beauti- 
ful house in St. James’ Square, London, he had just 


204 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


come home from a session of the House of Lords 
where the vote against the Bill just passed by the 
House of Commons to permit local option was over- 
whelming, in other words, the permission to let 
the people of a great empire say whether they would 
have a saloon in their town was denied them, be- 
cause the old House of Lords to which a man like 
Lord Kinnaird belonged was composed in large part 
by men who owned breweries and distilleries, and 
their property could not be endangered no matter 
how much destruction the liquor business created 
among the bodies and souls of his Majesty’s sub- 
jects. Property, in the eyes of the English Brewer 
and Distiller has always been far more precious than 
persons. 

One of the most interesting occasions that I find 
myself recording of my travels in London was the 
invitation to meet the group of members of the 
English House of Commons who were fighting for 
the Local Option Bill, at a luncheon held at the 
famous Holborn Restaurant. 

I walked from my hotel to the restaurant, and 
found I was a little ahead of the time. One of the 
restaurant officials ushered me into the waiting room 
and I was just about to cross over to the place where 
coats and hats were hung up when I nearly collided 
with a very tall and distinguished looking gentle- 
man who came unexpectedly out of a side door. He 
looked at me very sharply as if to say, “And who 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 205 


are you?” inasmuch as the High Holborn was a 
very exclusive restaurant where strangers were 
looked at with care. His look was so near like a 
question that seeing I was the guest of the evening 
on the occasion, I said without meaning to be in 
any way pompous or egotistical, simply explanatory 
to set the gentleman at his ease and let him know I 
was not an intruder, “I’m Mr. Sheldon.” 

“Oh! Are you?” he said, still staring, ““And who 
am Lf. 

I was so overcome by the question that to this 
day I do not really know what I ought to have said 
in reply, if indeed any reply was called for. Of 
course I might have said any number of things, in 
addition to one or two that I kept to myself. I 
might have said, “I haven’t the least idea. Who 
ARE you?” Or I might have said, “Ah! The 
Prince of Wales! Happy to meet you! Shake!” 

After the members of the House were seated at 
the luncheon table, the Chairman, who was the Hon- 
orable Leif Jones, a Parliament member and Presi- 
dent of the United Kingdom Alliance, broke a Brit- 
ish rule by introducing me to the gentleman on my 
right by saying, ““Mr. Sheldon, the gentleman on 
your right is Lord Thorndyke.” I turned to look at 
the gentleman on my right and it was the same 
elegantly dressed person I had met with a bang 
in the waiting room. Before the luncheon was over 
I was on speaking terms with him, and as he was 


206 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


one of a few prohibition members of the House of 
Lords and really interested in conditions in America, 
and especially in Kansas, I found he was an intelli- 
gent and shrewd questioner and when he spoke dur- 
ing the after dinner program he went several blocks 
out of his way to utter a very delicately worded 
compliment to the way prohibition was enforced in 
the guest’s state of Kansas. In thinking it over 
afterwards I came to the conclusion that perhaps 
that was the noble Lord’s way of expressing his 
apology for the asking me who HE was. I met 
Lord Thorndyke once or twice after that meeting in 
Holborn, and inasmuch as he asked me out to his 
home for the week end I have inferred that he did 
not take any umbrage from the incident in the wait- 
ing room where I failed to answer the interesting 
query he shot at me. | 

It was a few days after the luncheon at the Hol- 
born Restaurant that I was invited by Archdeacon 
Sinclair of St. Pauls to a luncheon in the Arch- 
deacon’s residence opposite the Cathedral. ‘There 
were several clergymen present, and after the lunch- 
eon, at which nearly every one present had imbibed 
considerable claret, the host brought out a center- 
piece of the famous cathedral made of solid silver 
with pockets on each of the four sides of the church 
for holding cigarettes. We sat about the table 
talking on various subjects including prohibition in- 
asmuch as the Archdeacon and his clergy knew my 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 207 


errand in Great Britain was to create sentiment for 
the closing of the public houses and the ultimate 
creation of actual prohibition for the entire Empire. 

The guests including the Archdeacon asked me 
many questions about the prohibition conditions in 
America which I answered to the best of my ability. 
While we were talking the servants brought in claret 
again and every one of the ecclesiastical group ex- 
cept myself partook. Two days after that meeting 
I read in the London Times an account of an im- 
portant meeting in one of the halls of London where 
Archdeacon Sinclair had addressed two hundred 
barmaids who had called a meeting to protest 
against the local option bill then pending in the 
House of Commons, as if it passed it would take 
away their means of livelihood. ‘The Archdeacon 
in an earnest address which the barmaids loudly. 
cheered pledged his influence to oppose the local op- 
tion bill and support the breweries and distilleries. 
I learned afterwards what I did not know at the 
luncheon, that the Archdeacon was a heavy stock- 
holder in Brewer’s Scrip and that the Dean of St. 
Pauls has been for more than seven hundred years 
the custodian of the cathedral’s own brewery which 
furnished a large revenue for the church income. 
Surely it is a far cry from Prohibition Kansas to the 
ecclesiastical state of Great Britain. 

One of the most interesting and unusual sights 
Mrs. Sheldon and I have put down in our experience 


208 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


was the sight of a group of feeble minded ladies 
at Ryde, the Isle of Wight. I was the guest of the 
lady who was appointed by the government at a 
large income to superintend the establishment which 
houses in an elegant building, a group of old ladies 
who are the hereditary result of close intermarriage 
of nobility. These old ladies were dressed in the 
richest and most elegant style. ‘The table where 
they appeared with our hostess and ourselves was 
of the most choice in its menu and servant-served 
appointments. But the long list of inmates, if that 
is the word to use, sat there during the meal time 
almost without a word spoken. The smiles on their 
faces were vacant and their minds were those of 
little children. I think the memory of that table 
surrounded with the human illustration of human 
imbecility in its worship of the false thing called 
nobility and rank sent me on my way with a con- 
tempt for the thing called “royalty” that grows 
stronger with the years. 

The visit to Guernsey was specially exciting to 
me because of an unusual opportunity to see Victor 
Hugo’s famous house Hauteville at St. Peter Port. 

Picture an old house on a steep and narrow street 
hardly wider than a lane. The interior filled with 
old furniture and pictures and pieces of curious 
works of Victor Hugo’s own handicraft in the mat- 
ter of glazed salt cellars and other pottery. Also 
in the down stairs rooms darkly wainscoted etchings 





THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 209 


and paintings the work also of the poet. Upstairs 
one enters a small chamber which at once makes one 
think of a conservatory, so completely surrounded 
is it with glass. And the view through the sides of 
this small room is astonishing, overlooking the red 
housetops of St. Peter Port, across the Channel to 
the Island of Sark, the scene of the struggle with the 
devil fish in the ‘“Toilers of the Sea.”’ But over in 
the farther corner of this room is the object that 
claims first attention, for on that corner table fas- 
tened into the wall Victor Hugo stood up to write 
‘Les Miserables,” and “‘Toilers of the Sea.’”’ When 
he was in need of rest from his writing, he walked 
into the next room, not more than ten by twelve in 
size, and lay down on a cot which was not over a 
foot from the floor. 

It seemed amazing to me that any human being 
could write imaginative stories in a room that by its 
very situation and character provoked the gaze out 
Over a panorama scarcely equalled any where in 
Europe for beauty and power. In times of storm, 
when Sark was shrouded in mist and St. Peter Port 
was swept with the Channel gales it does not seem 
possible that a writer of fiction could so command 
his attention that he could stand by the hour as 
Hugo did at that little corner and continue to write, 
oblivious of the magnificent and wondrous scenes 
that beat as it were right up against that glass sur- 
rounded little room at the top of Hauteville House. 


210 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Norway is the only country I ever visited where 
I did not have to hold some sort of a meeting, and 
address some sort of an audience. I am willing to 
confess that it was a great relief, after filling speak- 
ing engagements in Great Britain that had compelled 
railroad travel for two months, crossing England 
six times from east to west and four times north 
and south, and being in a different town and a dif- 
ferent hotel bed every night for fifty-seven consecu- 
tive days. Mrs. Sheldon and I traveled alone, 
avoiding the tourist parties and personally conducted 
groups, and had no difficulty in finding our way 
around, even into byways and seldom traveled paths 
into quaint nooks and corners of that most wonder- 
fully entrancing fiord and cascade country. There 
was never a hamlet or small village into which we 
entered that did not have some man or woman who 
could talk English and many of the young men had 
been to London and nearly all of the young people 
were studying the English language during the long 
winters when they were shut out from all the world 
on their little farms. Our memory of Norway is 
an abiding memory of fascinating mountain rides 
like the one down the Stalheim valley, and the aston- 
ishing scenery around Eide and Odde, and the Bal- 
holm district. It was a place to rest the weary mind 
and let God do the talking. 

My travel in France was limited to Paris and its 
environs. It was the time of the Paris Exposition, 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 211 


and the city was filled with visitors from all over 
the world. It was the hottest summer that Paris 
had ever known. I remember going up to the top of 
the Eiffel Tower one day, but even up there the 
heat was almost as stifling as it can sometimes be 
out in Kansas with a hot wind blowing from the 
south. The one thing that I carried away from 
Paris as a life long memory was the mile or more 
of pictures out at Versailles depicting the wars of 
Napoleon. The ghastly details, disemboweled 
horses writhing in agony, the torn bodies of men, 
butchered for a single man’s egotistic ambition, the 
blazing ruins of cities and the misery of blasted 
homes,—all struck me as a wonderful argument 
against the glory of war, and I said to myself as I 
walked past the tremendous number of such paint- 
ings that if the artist had happened to be a pacifist 
who hated war with all his soul he could not possibly 
have done any thing to create a horror of war bet- 
ter than by picturing it in the ghastly and monstrous 
scenes that line the walls of the galleries at Ver- 
sailles. And yet the people who walked by the 
paintings the day I was out there, admired their 
technical skill, and for the most part were thrilled 
by the memories they evoked of the great Warrior 
that great Emperor, in other words that Master 
Butcher of men, Napoleon. As far as my observa- 
tion goes, up to the present moment, the most ter- 
rible scenes picturing war, in film or on canvas have 


212 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


very little effect on the average mind or imagination 
to create a horror of war. The very opposite result 
is found, in an inward glory, at least that seems to 
be the thought in the minds of the French them- 
selves as they walk past these horrors, and muse 
over the “glory” that shone around the “Little 
Corporal.” It is a strange world where wholesale 
murder on a grand scale provokes the admiration of 
the great multitude. 

And speaking of war takes me in memory down 
to Australia and New Zealand, for it was while I 
was in Melbourne that the news flashed over twelve 
thousand miles, of the shot fired at the Archduke, 
the noise of which reverberated over the countries 
under the Southern Cross, and stirred the old Maori 
peoples of New Zealand, of fighting stock to go and 
be killed under the Union Jack that their grand- 
fathers once fought against. 

My travel to Australia was caused by an invita- 
tion from the Young Men’s Christian Association 
embracing both Australia and New Zealand to hold 
a number of conferences under the Association direc- 
tion in a large number of towns, and my church gave 
me leave of absence for four months to carry out 
that program. On the way from San Francisco it 
was part of the plan to stop over at Honolulu and 
conduct a number of meetings there and on other 
islands of the Hawaiian group. 

Seven hundred miles out from San Francisco on a 





THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 213 


clear day in the middle of the afternoon in a calm 
sea, the Sierra, our boat of passage suddenly shook 
from stem to stern as if it had run onto a coral 
reef and scraped the entire bottom off. Then there 
was an ominous twist to the vessel, and all of us 
who were in the lounge ran out on deck. It was not 
until two hours later after the boat had been slowed 
down almost to drifting that the captain and officers 
discovered that one of the twin screw propellers had 
snapped off close up to the strut, seven hundred 
pounds of metal going to the bottom, leaving the 
propeller beam as smooth at the end as if the screw 
had been sawed off. 

The captain sent a wireless message back to the 
Company in San Francisco asking for orders as to 
the ship’s course, and within an hour word came to 
go on to Honolulu on one wheel which we did, 
seemingly with little serious difficulty. We had no 
sooner resumed our course than a wireless dropped 
into my lap coming from Wellington, New Zealand 
via Honolulu, saying that my Association program 
had been taken over by the United Kingdom Alli- 
ance, if it would make no difference to me. It did 
not, and all my travel in both Australia and New 
Zealand during the next exciting two months was 
directed by the Society which corresponded to the 
Alliance in Great Britain under which I had held 
two campaigns several years apart. 

Beginning at Honolulu I held a number of meet- 


214 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


ings in Oahu and Maui, and stayed in Honolulv 
three weeks. The most interesting event to me was 
a Sunday I spent with Dr. Scudder the pastor of 
the great Central church. We sat on the porch of 
his home that Sunday afternoon, looking off through 
the rainbow mist at Diamond Head, the Gibraltar 
of the Pacific. The government, that is, ours, was 
fortifying it to make it a formidable military point. 
I asked the usual questions of the visitor and of 
course I asked about the Japanese who were so 
prominent in Honolulu and everywhere in the 
islands, concerning their probable attitude towards 
our possessions in the Pacific. 

Dr. Scudder was born in Japan, knew personally 
and held in highest esteem the great statesman of 
that country and was a close and intensely interested 
student of Japanese history. I shall never forget the 
more than scorn with which he expressed his opin- 
ion of the Jingoes in the United States who would 
make us believe that the Yellow peril was Japan. 
“If the Christian people of America would put the 
same amount of energy and commercial and political 
effort to create good will and friendship for Japan 
as the militarists put forth to create suspicion and 
generate hate and misunderstanding between the 
two countries, there could never be any possible 
trouble between the United States and Japan Even 
as it is, there is not the slightest reason for believing 
that the Japanese as a people ever would entertain 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 215 


the thought of trying to capture the Hawaiian 
Islands, not even if we had no fortifications like 
the one at Diamond Head.” 

I am quoting Dr. Scudder’s words, but I cannot 
convey to you the reader, his looks as he spoke. 
There are times when, like Dr. Scudder I cannot 
help wondering whether when final history is writ- 
ten by a truthful world historian, it will not be found 
that judging from events political and economic 
there have been many occasions when the Japanese 
have acted the part of Christian gentlemen towards 
this country in a manner to make us ask whether 
all the so-called christianity is confined to the coun- 
tries that claim that distinction. At any rate I[ 
cannot see that the Yellow peril is any more likely 
to annex the United States now than it was when 
Chautauqua ana Young Men’s Christian Associa- 
tion speakers were hysterically declaiming against 
Japan forty years ago. By the way there is con- 
siderable difference between hysterical and historical 
accuracy, when it comes to dealing with international 
questions. 

I made a few speaking engagements in Australia, 
beginning with Sydney, and then went to Melbourne. 
The day atter I arrived there the notice was posted 
up in front of the press buildings of the declaration 
of war between Great Britain and Germany. I made 
several speaking trips at points near Melbourne, 
but the atmosphere of the great tragedy was every- 


216 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


where and it was a mental and moral impossibility 
to carry on the campaign that had been mapped out 
by my friends in the Alliance. Audiences flocked 
into the churches and halls and crowded them, but 
the one question asked at all of them was “What 
will your country do?” The only answer I could 
give was President Wilson’s, “we will remain neu- 
tral until,—”’ and that was as far as any one could 
get. 

Returning to Sydney to find a boat to take us 
back home, we found that the regular passenger 
service was impossible because all boats under the 
British flag had been commandeered for transport 
uses. It was a most embarrassing time for me, ow- 
ing to the fact that I was short of funds and owing 
to the breaking up of the Alliance program, I was 
without money to pay my expenses in hotels for any 
length of time. While waiting for some sort of 
transportation home, I received a cable from the 
friends in the Alliance office headquarters at Well- 
ington, New Zealand, saying that owing to the 
breaking out of the war it would be absolutely im- 
possible to carry out the original program which | 
had called me away from home, and telling me not 
to come over there to Wellington. 

In the course of a long experience with programs 
and public speaking I think I may safely say that 
I had never faced anything just like the situation 
that now confronted me, and for a day or two I was 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 217 


honestly perplexed. But the second day after get- 
ting the cable from Wellington telling me that all 
plans had been given up, I cabled back that I would 
come to New Zealand anyway, because I could get 
a boat from Sydney to Wellington and I might as 
well be there as in Australia, if I had to take out 
naturalization papers in case I[ could not get back to 
my own country, that I would not hold the Alliance 
to any program, but leave it entirely to their own 
judgment after I arrived, if it might seem wise to 
hold any speaking program. In any case I sent 
word that I understood the situation and would not 
embarrass the Alliance in any way, on account of the 
unexpected conditions that had arisen. 

There were two passenger boats still plying be- 
tween Sydney and Wellington, and I secured pas- 
sage on one of them for Mrs. Sheldon, my young 
son, Merriam, and myself, and we made the crossing 
of the stormy New Zealand Sea under rather dis- 
tressing conditions that are simply the common lot 
of the traveler and need not be mentioned. But 
before leaving Sydney a rather remarkable event oc- 
curred that I think may be told at this time without 
being misunderstood, and hurt no one, not even the 
military characters who were a part of the little 
drama that became a part of history for the lad and 
furnished a text for his father with which to em- 
bellish a story or illuminate a conviction. 

The day before our boat was to leave Sydney, one 


218 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


of the city magistrates called at the hotel to ask if 
we would not like to take an automobile ride about 
the city, and we gladly accepted. Going by the city 
end of the magnificent Sydney harbor we stopped to * 
see the first transport leaving with one thousand 
Australian recruits on their way up to New Guinea 
where two weeks later they captured the German 
possessions. The day after this transport sailed out 
of the Sydney Heads, five large German merchant 
vessels sailed in through the Heads, and interned 
themselves. The captains and officers did not know 
that war had been declared, and it made no differ- 
ence under international law, for the vessels were 
the prize of war to the Australian government, and 
the men and crews of the vessels were interned in 
Sydney for the war’s duration. 

Our host drove us out to the famous harbor en- 
trance, and our boy ran up on the rocky ledge that 
forms a grim part of the noble Heads that make 
natural sentinels fronting the sea, leaving a most 
stately entrance for all ocean going craft, the rocky 
formation standing up like a work of engineering, — 
as indeed it is, being the handiwork of the Master 
Architect. The harbor and its surroundings were 
just the material for a fine photograph to add to 
many I had taken of unusual scenes in the Melbourne 
district, and which I had left in the camera until I 
could find a good opportunity to have them printed. 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 219 


There were two films left, and the boy said he 
would finish them with the harbor exposures. 

We sat in the automobile, his mother and I, while 
he ran up on the ledge, and we little thought as he 
stood there taking pictures that he would soon be- 
come the first American arrested for a spy by the 
great British Empire which had just entered the 
Great War. 

He had started to run down the ledge when a man 
in uniform stepped out from a sentry box that we 
had not noticed, near the gate to the fortifications, 
clapped his hand heavily on the boy’s shoulder 
and declared him under arrest for taking a picture 
of a fortification during war time. 

The sentry brought the boy down past the auto- 
mobile where we were waiting, and said he had 
orders to convey the boy into the guard house for 
examination. Without any more words, regardless 
of the questions of our host and his explanation that 
we were Americans, the soldier and our boy entered 
the barbed wire enclosure and disappeared around a 
corner. As the lad passed us we thought his eye 
gleamed with a look of some real satisfaction. For 
that very morning he had been saying at the hotel 
that he was tired of Australia and nothing exciting 
was going on and he longed to be back in Kansas. 
The look on his face now seemed to say, ‘Something 
happening now.” 

We waited in that automobile for more than an 


220 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


hour for the boy to come back. Our host, one of 
the best known merchants and a magistrate of Syd- 
ney twice tried to pass the sentry at the wire en- 
closure, but was not allowed to enter. ‘The boy’s 
mother had visions of a firing squad and the boy’s 
father had visions of precious pictures taken at 
great trouble still unprinted in the camera. 

At last the sentry appeared with the boy, minus 
the camera as I had expected. They were also ac- 
companied by an officer who gravely took all our 
names, asked us numerous questions to the answers 
of which he seemed to take suspicious denial, and 
said that the camera would be destroyed with every- 
thing in it. I ventured to explain that the films 
undeveloped in the camera had been taken before 
the war was declared and that they were simply 
pictures taken of persons and of gatherings con- 
nected with my mission which in itself was entirely 
peaceful and in the interest of the people’s welfare. 
The officer listened gravely, but when I was through, 
he simply said that my son’s offense in taking a pic- 
ture of the Heads was an exceedingly serious one, 
and further action against it would have to be taken. 
He took elaborate notes of the address of the hotel 
at which we were staying, and when I ventured to 
say that we had taken passage in one of the regular 
packets for Wellington the next day, he replied that 
we might be detained in Australia indefinitely. 

On the way back to the hotel our host exploded 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 221 


several times. He was a loyal Australian Britisher 
ready to die for his country, but he cursed in pic- 
turesque language that even an American could un- 
derstand, the stupidity of the military, and as we 
drove by one of the stationery or book stalls he 
pointed to a rack in the window which contained 
over one hundred post cards photographing the exact 
picture my son had taken, all to be purchased by any 
one for one penny a piece. 

The boy’s mother was so glad to get the boy 
back unshot that the loss of the camera and the 
undeveloped films in it did not concern her. But 
I must confess that the boy’s father, while thinking 
just as much of his welfare as his mother did, had 
his own opinions of the military regulations and was 
thankful to his host for expressing them in language 
almost as vigorous as he could do it himself in the 
United States tongue. 

We waited at the hotel the next morning, with 
our things all packed for the New Zealand steamer, 
but understanding from the officer’s orders that we 
were all under strong suspicion as questionable char- 
acters. About noon another officer called at the 
hotel and we were all ordered to appear before him 
in the hotel parlor or lounge. There, to my great 
surprise the camera was returned to us, minus all 
the films that had been in it. The officer told us 
in language that bordered on the magisterial that 
the films were considered to be the prize of war, 


222 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


and could not by any possibility be returned not 
even if they were, as I declared them to be, only 
pictures of Australian friends and scenes that had 
no more to do with the war than the post cards down 
town in the book shop window. 

To this, the officer replied that he was acting 
under orders from the highest military authority, 
and he gave us all to understand that our act in 
attempting to take a photograph of the Heads was 
reprehensible in the extreme. I am confident that 
from first to last he suspected us of some deep and 
damnable German plot to blow up the fortifications, 
capture the transports in the harbor, surround the 
troops that were being mobilized, seize the city of 
Sydney, poison the inhabitants and hoist the German 
flag over the City Hall, and proclaim a Hohen- 
zollern Annex to the Fatherland. He kept us under 
the closest interrogation for nearly an hour, during 
which time I gave him every possible proof of our 
American ancestry, referring him to the magistrate 
who had been our host, to nearly every clergyman in 
Sydney .in two of whose churches I had preached, to 
the press notices of meetings held in Melbourne © 
where the largest halls had been filled, and page 
notices of the meetings had been published. I spread 
these proofs all before the military gentlemen, but 
he did not appear to be at all satisfied, and only 
with great reluctance gave his consent to our de- 
parture for Wellington on the afternoon boat. I . 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 223 


took occasion to assure him that we did not plan 
to return to Sydney, and I wanted to add that my 
wife did not have any bombs concealed in her 
traveling bag with which to send the boat and all 
its crew and freight and passengers to the bottom, 
all the members of our family, of course, accom- 
panying them. By making superhuman exertions 
we managed with the help of our merchant and 
magisterial friend to catch the boat just in time. 
The officer, with two others in full uniform were 
present on the dock as the steamer cleared, and 
they must have heaved a sigh of relief at our de- 
parture, priding themselves that their military duty 
had been strictly performed, and the rules of war 
enforced with impartial justice. As we sailed out 
of the Heads I took occasion to warn my son not to 
look at them as we passed out, as it might lead to 
another arrest and one arrest a week was all we 
needed to make us proud of our country and long to 
get back to it. 

When we reached Wellington I found that the 
Alliance had met and decided to go on with the 
program or at least start it and see if the results 
would justify it. To their surprise and to mine, after 
we had started the campaign it seemed to go of its 
own accord, and in following the plan carefully laid 
out by the Committee, with the New Zealand 
shrewdness and attention to detail characteristic 
of them, with their chairmen attending to the super- 


224 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


intending of local affairs, I traveled all over the 
country going from Auckland to Invercargil, and 
taking in nearly thirty places in between, occupying 
in all a little over five weeks. 

I have always thought that one reason why the 
people in every place responded to the call to sup- 
port a prohibition campaign during the stress and 
excitement of mobilization for a great war was be- 
cause the people of New Zealand had for years been 
very much interested in national prohibition and the 
matter of drink on the troop ships and the effect of 
an army canteen on their boys was a matter that 
excited the greatest concern. To the credit of New 
Zealand military authorities it must be said that 
for the first time in the histroy of the local army 
the troop ships that sailed from Wellington and 
Auckland went overseas without any ship canteen 
that carried liquor. The announcement of this order 
from the commanding officer roused great enthus- 
iasm among all the temperance and prohibition peo- 
ple of all the towns where the Alliance had planned 
and carried out the meetings in which I had the 
privilege of taking part with a number of local 
speakers. I may say here that the finances of the 
campaign were entirely taken care of by the Alli- 
ance. No solicitation for funds was made at the 
meetings themselves, and the voluntary offering 
called for at the close of each gathering was always 
an offering for the war fund, not for the Alliance 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 225 


prohibition fund. I never knew the details of the 
financial plan of meeting expenses, but all I know 
is that the Committee lived up to the original con- 
tract made with me before the emergency of the war 
was thought of, and my expenses for the possible 
journey home were generously met as I had thought, 
at one time when I was hardly able to pay my hotel 
bills in Sydney, they might not be. 

Acting on the advice of the Committee as I 
started on my travels down the long length of the 
country I bought a “Tourist” ticket or more exactly, 
a ‘‘time’’ ticket, paying ten pounds, or about $48 for 
transportation on either the government owned rail- 
roads or steamboat lines good for a period of seven 
weeks. This kind of railroad ticket is a boon to the 
constant traveler, as I did not have to buy any more 
tickets for seven weeks, I did not have to tell the 
guard where I was going, I was entitled to ride 
day and night on any train or boat as long as I[ 
wished within the limit of the seven weeks period, in 
fact I could have lived on the trains and boats every 
hour of the seven weeks. It cost me about a quarter 
of a cent a mile to travel in New Zealand and I have 
remembered that convenience, as well as the govern- 
ment rule against tipping, whenever I am traveling 
in my own country, and do not feel easy in my mind 
if I leave the Pullman diner without adding a good 
per cent of the price of my meal to the salary of 
the man who has waited on me and is a servant of 


226 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


the traveler’s railroad corporation which pays good 
dividends sometimes, a percent of which must come 
out of the American traveler’s good natured stupid- 
ity. In this connection I remember that the best 
meal I ever ate on a railroad diner I ate on the New 
Zealand railroads, paying two shillings, or forty- 
eight cents for a meal that consisted of soup, fish, 
a choice of three kinds of meat including the choic- 
est mutton, three vegetables, coffee or tea, bread 
and butter, cheese, and a pudding or some form of 
pastry for dessert. And to crown the entire feast, 
no fee to the waiter under penalty of breaking the 
rules of the road. 

My itinerary for five weeks, on a national pro- 
hibition program, during the excitement and stress 
of a population engrossed with the drafting of its 
men to go over twelve thousand miles to fight for 
a country that had only a nominal political claim 
on its country, included all of New Zealand, begin- 
ning with Auckland, then to Wellington, to Christ- 
church, Amaru, Timaru, Rotarua, Dunedin and 
Invercargil, the largest town nearest the South Pole. 
At every one of these places and points between, a 
few only on the west coast, enormous crowds filled 
the town halls or churches, and great enthusiasm 
was shown, to such an extent that I have never been 
able to explain the matter except by taking account 
of the New Zealand character, which is no more 
like that of the average Australian than the Irish 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 227 


are like the Jews. J am quite convinced that no 
such prohibition campaign could by any possibility 
have been carried on in Australia as was carried 
through successfully in New Zealand. The people 
in every town I entered and wherever I spoke or 
preached seemed to me to be like Yankeeized Brit- 
ishers. ‘They were not like either British or Cana- 
dian, but peculiar to their own country and to the 
freedom of a land that has tried new laws and estab- 
lished new customs. They have not been afraid of 
attempting untried things or giving them up when 
they found they did not work. 

During the entire five weeks filled with the excite- 
ment of huge gatherings in strange places, the one 
theme of the people was the war and its probable 
outcome and always that question put at every 
gathering ‘““What will the United States do?” And 
then out we would go from the meeting place and 
the instant sight that would greet us would be the 
citizen night drilling for home defence, the pas- 
sage of recruits bound for the boats or the camp, 
the stir and the noise and the ominous grim presence 
of that monster Mars, calling without remorse or 
pity the choicest and youngest of a nation’s best 
blood to pour it out on the sacrificial stone. 

And the companies that filed past that attracted 
our attention perhaps with keenest interest were the 
Maori troops, the dark skinned and athletic young 


228 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


men of the original native stock of New Zealand, 
who one hundred years ago were fighting the British 
army, and many times beating it with their remark- 
able fortifications and unequalled bravery. Silently 
I see these youths marching past in the towns on the 
east coast, eager to do their part out of loyalty to 
the British Empire, although they have never seen 
its King or known exactly what the whole thing is 
about. The whole hearted loyalty that both the 
Australian and New Zealand people displayed for 
the British Empire was a wonderful tribute to the 
something that has made possible the knitting to- 
gether of the English speaking peoples who have at 
some time or other owed allegiance to the English 
rule. 

I had some rather unusual experiences on this 
New Zealand trip, not all of them occasioned by the 
war atmosphere. At Gore, the first town in New 
Zealand to enact a local option law, I spoke in a 
large hall where the presiding officer was a local 
minister, the man who had been responsible for 
the prohibitory sentiment and action. The evening 
was so raw and chilly that most of the men in the — 
audience wore their overcoats, as in accordance 
with New Zealand custom as in Great Britain, there 
was no heating plant in the hall except a small fire- 
place that looked as if any fire built in it would 
die of sheer discouragement on account of the size 
of the room. The committee and the chairman and 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 229 


myself sat on the enormous platform, and a good 
quartette of young men sang some opening selec- 
tions, their frosty breaths streaming across the chilly 
platform, varying in degree of density and length as 
they sang pianissimo or fortissimo. 

I was introduced by the chairman who concluded 
his words of introduction by saying, “I am going to 
ask Dr. Sheldon if he will be willing to have the 
evening offering taken when he is about half through 
his address, and after the offering resume where he 
left off.” 

He paused a moment and looked at me, and as it 
was a new idea to me never before proposed I 
naturally hesitated a moment, but I have learned in 
time to accept the unusual and untried things that a 
public speaker may meet, and I nodded assent, and 
the chairman seemed satisfied and the quartette 
sang again to the accompaniment of steam clouds 
that wafted gracefully across the hall, before it 
was my turn to speak one half of my piece before 
the offering was taken up. 

I tried to work my speech up to a fitting climax 
that would permit of a proper place to stop for the 
offering, but not being used to the thing I believe 
my effort was only partly successful. The offering 
however, was taken up successfully, and at its con- 
clusion the frosty voiced quartette sang another 
selection and I resumed where I had left off, and as 
I did so I noticed the smile of satisfaction on the 


280 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


face of the chairman, who I afterwards learned was 
a good Scotch Presbyterian. 

At the close of the meeting I went home with his 
brother as he was entertaining me over night. After 
we were inside his house where I was thankful to 
find a cheerful fire in a good sized grate, he volun- 
teered the information that I am afraid I would 
never have plucked up courage enough to ask him 
for, by telling me that the Gore audiences some- 
times had the habit of going away in more or less 
large sections before an offering was taken, if the 
offering came after an address. ‘So I thought of 
the plan we tried tonight, and it worked well, my 
brother. I knew the audience would not go away 
without getting their money’s worth in your address, 
after they had paid down their hard money. You 
stopped in a good place, and had them guessing 
as to the last half of that story you told. By the 
way, what was the exact point of it?’ (I should 
have said that Gore was one exception to the regular 
custom during the campaign of taking the offering 
for the war fund. The Gore people stipulated that 
my expenses should be paid out of an evening offer- 
ing and that the contribution to the war fund would 
be met by a special local pledge.) Perhaps I do not 
need to add again that my host and most of his 
people were good Scotch Presbyterians. 

There was one good passenger boat left on the 
Pacific under the British flag, and that was the 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 231 


Niagara, an oil burner which had not been com- 
mandeered for transport service. We finally secured 
passage for the United States on this boat, a very 
beautiful and handsomely equipped vessel, and left 
Wellington the last of September. The regular 
route of the Niagara was via Honolulu to San Fran- 
cisco and from there to Victoria. But there were 
three German war ships in the Pacific which had 
been sinking New Zealand mutton boats. These 
were the Leipsic, the Scharnhorst, and the Gneis- 
enau. The captain of the Niagara had his orders 
from the company to be on the constant look out for 
these German boats, as they were on the lookout 
for the Niagara. We went straight up across the 
Pacific for twenty-one days and nights not stopping 
at Honolulu or San Francisco, but making direct 
for Victoria, which we reached without meeting a 
single vessel on the way. At night the canvas cur- 
tains were stretched around the decks and double 
vestibules were built in front of all the lounge and 
cabin doorways. No lights were displayed, not even 
the starboard and port, and we went up in the dark, 
a dismal and gloomy little group of passengers, only 
a handful that were thrown together like haphazard 
travelers across the world, the one event that ob- 
truded into every heart and mind being the mon- 
strous bloody and pagan thing that the centuries 
even after Christ have not yet wiped off the pages 
of even christian civilization. The German war 


232 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


ships were all sunk a few weeks later off the Falk- 
land Islands. 

I went directly from this trip across the Pacific 
into the campaign of the Flying Squadron, joining 
the other groups at Seattle, and letting Mrs. Shel- 
don and the boy continue on to our home in Kansas 
which I did not see again until the Squadron had 
swung clear around the map, from Maine to Texas. 
I have already told the story of that travel period, 
and it does not need repeating in this chapter. But 
I do not want to close this travel narrative without 
paying a tribute to the men and women who direct 
the ways of the traveler. In all the hundreds of 
thousands of miles I have traveled by all sorts of 
conveyances, I have never met with an accident or 
been subjected to any but the most trivial annoy- 
ances. I think it speaks volumes for the integrity 
and faithful attention to daily duty on the part of 
the thousands of employees on the railroads that 
passengers are carried so safely and decently. The 
overwhelming majority of persons who are helping 
a train or a steamer to arrive are doing their work 
day and night without thanks or praise. If any one © 
out of the many who are responsible for human 
safety and comfort as they travel were to fail of 
common tasks the whole thing would collapse re- 
peatedly and travel would be an adventure too dan- 
gerous to undertake. 

I also wish to express my great feeling of grati- 


THE TRAVEL CHAPTER 233 


tude for the pleasant and enduring friendships that 
have been my privilege to enjoy in the different coun- 
tries visited. Any disagreeable or unusual experi- 
ences with folks have been incidental. I owe to the 
English people and to large numbers in Scotland, 
Ireland and Wales, and Australia and New Zea- 
land a debt of gratitude for wonderful kindness 
shown me in ways that cannot be described in any 
book. ‘These are the choicest souvenirs I cherish 
as I unpack my bag at the end of the journey, and 
pray for blessings not my own, but those of a 
Greater One, to rest on all who have made the 
travel chapter of my life interesting and memorable. 


CHAPTER NINE 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 


If the events and comments in this chapter seem 
to be thrown together without any attention to 
logical order and precision, it is because it is done 
on purpose. I have been writing articles and edi- 
torials and sermons and stories all my life with the 
thought of the critic and reviewer more or less in 
my mind, and I am going to write this chapter just 
as I please. I like to think that Kansas, ever since 
it began to be known, has acted that way, and a 
chapter that is headed up with that name ought to 
be consistently independent and go along as if there 
wasn’t any thing else in the universe except itself. 

I am going to start right off by saying I like 
Kansas, and Kansas folks. People who have lived 
east of the Harlem river all their lives and who 
think Kansas has no scenery, and that the people 
are also queer, do not understand prairie countries 
or folks. There is no scenery anywhere more beau- 
tiful than prairie scenery, and no people more inter- 
esting than prairie people. My boyhood was spent 
on the prairies of South Dakota, and thirty-five years 


of my manhood have been spent on the prairies of 
234 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 235 


Kansas, and I have lived in the mountains and beside 
the two seas, and the prairie has a charm and a 
restfulness and an enduring quality that neither the 
mountains nor the sea can impart. 

When it comes to folks, I confess to a liking for 
people of independent and unconventional habits. 
Kansas is full of them. It has been made by them; 
folks like Secretary of Agriculture F. D. Coburn 
who when the Governor of Kansas and the Legisla- 
ture and all the people in Kansas wanted him to be 
a Senator and go to Washington, and offered the 
senatorship to him, said plainly, “I don’t want it. 
Let me alone. I like what I am doing here;’’ folks 
like William Allen White of Emporia, who never 
did a mean thing, and no one knows how many good 
ones, they are so many and so shyly done. When 
he entered on the campaign for the Governorship of 
Kansas, the year that President Coolidge was elected 
by saying little and saving much, Mr. White made 
‘ his campaign as an anti-Klan candidate. He had 
no organization, and did not want one. When the 
campaign was over he had spoken to 100,000 people 
and after the election was over and the votes counted 
he had 100,000 marked for him. The evening he 
spoke on the anti-Klan issue in Topeka he asked 
me to introduce him. It was not necessary, but I 
consented, and said as little as seemed to me to be 
decent, inasmuch as the crowd that filled the auditor- 
ium to the roof, and spilled out of the windows had 


236 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


come to hear him. I have always believed that intro- 
ductory speeches are unnecessary, and audiences gen- 
erally regard them as a nuisance and worse. ‘The 
week following that White meeting I received a lot 
of letters protesting against my little talk, calling 
it an unfair political attack on the Klan. All of 
which simply strengthened my convictions that in- 
troductory talks are a bore and a failure. I vowed 
then that I would never try to introduce any one 
again, unless it was Mr. White. I would count it 
an honor to introduce him anywhere any time al- 
though he needs less introducing than any Kansas 
man I know. I like Mr. White because he is not 
afraid to be what he seems to be, and because he 
had the courage to refuse to print in the Emporia 
Gazette any cross word puzzles. Any man who 
has the courage to face popular disfavor by refusing 
to do a thing like that has my hearty approval, 
especially when he covers cross sections of American 
life with the honest breadth of conviction of my 
friend from that broadcasted town called Emporia. 

I like Kansas folks like Mr. Harold T. Chase the 
editor of the Topeka Daily Capital who has written 
more editorials than any editor in this country. Mr. 
Chase was associated with me during the week of 
the experiment with the Capital as a Christian daily. 
I do not know what would have happened to me that 
week if I had not had the companionship and coun- 
sel of his wise and well equipped experience of news- 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 237 


papers and news. It is impossible to mention all the 
Kansas folk who helped me that week and of whom 
I shall always think with kindest memory. It would 
take another book, indeed, to mention by name all 
the Kansas people whom I know and for whom I 
would like to write,—not obituary notices, but 
Birthday Greetings, or Wedding Anniversary con- 
gratulations. If they do not find their names men- 
tioned anywhere in this Kansas chapter it is not 
because I have forgotten them, but because there 
are so many of them. Those I have mentioned or 
may yet, before I am through, are types of Kansas 
folks, the sort that speak the United States lan- 
guage, using a Kansas dictionary, and reserving the 
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of independent 
ideals, some of which work when made into laws 
by the legislature, and others of which may be de- 
clared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, for 
the general well being of the state as a whole. 

And the mention of the Supreme Court of Kansas 
calls up another Kansas man whom I like and have 
come to honor, and that is the Chief Justice, Judge 
W. A. Johnston, who has been at the head of the 
Supreme Bench for more than forty years, under all 
administrations, a Canadian by birth, but a resident 
of Kansas for more than fifty years, re-elected six 
times, and good for six times more, I hope, one of 
those who keep alive our faith in civic integrity and 
untarnished citizenship. 


238 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


If this were a logical narrative it would be a 
perfectly proper thing right here to say something 
about law enforcement in Kansas, and relate some 
little known history illustrating it. At the risk of 
being proper I will tell one or two stories about the 
way the prohibitory law was disobeyed and enforced 
thirty-five years ago. It may remind some of those 
who may read this chapter of how far we have come 
since the prohibitory law was passed in the year 
1881. 

It was the summer of 1892. Down on the 
Avenue, Kansas Avenue, Topeka, it was a common 
jest that the town was wide open, and that if any 
one wanted a drink all he had to do was to walk 
into any one of twenty-five different drug stores and 
get all the beer and whisky and brandy he wanted 
and get it without signing up for it. The Kansas 
law at that time gave drug stores permits to sell 
a quart of beer or whisky for medicinal purposes. 
The purchaser under the law was compelled to swear 
to his particular illness or ailment and then sign his 
name to the druggist’s permit which document was 
filed with the Probate Court, and was open to in- 
spection by any citizen who cared to look over the 
list. 

It was a most astonishing list, as I found out once 
when I went into the Probate Court’s office and 
looked it over. One of Topeka’s well known citi- 
zen’s had had a drink every day for a month, and 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 239 


a new disease nearly every day. Near the end of 
the month he had apparently run out of diseases, 
for he had put down as the ailment for which he 
needed medicinal help, ‘“Water on the stomach.” 
.He had never had any water on his stomach for 
years, and the druggist knew him as a confirmed 
toper and was willing to perjure his own soul for 
fifty cents, and did so very many times every day. 
In fact at the time this incident I am going to relate 
took place there was no pretense on the part of 
scores of drug stores to go through the legal formal- 
ity of issuing permits, but the customer purchased 
his drink as freely as he would buy a toothbrush 
or a cake of soap. It was commonly understood 
all over the town that these drug stores were nothing 
but joints in disguise, carrying a meager supply of 
drugs but making most of their money by the sale 
of whisky and beer. In addition to these pretended 
drug stores the town was full of regular joints that 
were running openly on the Avenue and Quincy 
street, under police protection or with regularly as- 
sessed fines of so much a month. It was a wide 
open town after more than ten years of statutory 
prohibition. 

The county attorney, who has always been the 
one person under the Kansas prohibitory law upon 
whom has fallen the duty of law enforcement, was 
doing nothing. The conditions lay heavy on my 
soul, for no one seemed to care. But thinking it all 


240 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


over one day while walking past a drug store on the 
Avenue and noting the crowd of citizens lined up at 
the counter waiting for their daily drink, I met one 
of my deacons, Mr. A. G. Carruth. He was at the 
time an expert proofreader for a publishing firm, 
and said to be the best proofreader in the state. 
And while I am speaking of Kansas people I have 
liked, Mr. Carruth was one. ‘The most honest 
minded and truthful minded man of my acquaintance 
at that time. If his middle name was “Gospel,” he 
did not belie it. 

I mentioned the drug store business to him, and he 
instantly responded, saying the conditions had be- 
come unbearable, that is, meaning to his own sense 
of what was right under the law. I suggested to 
him that we get evidence and present it to the county 
attorney and compel him to prosecute. 

He agreed at once, and without waiting to make 
any careful plans we walked into the first drug store 
in the block and bought a dozen bottles of beer, 
without signing up for anything. We then went 
down the Avenue two blocks farther and I bought 
two bottles of whisky of a drug store clerk. At 
the exact moment when the bottles passed from the 
clerk’s hands to mine, Mr. Carruth was standing 
behind me and did not actually see the bottles 
handed to me by the clerk, but he did see me pay 
him the money and the next second when I turned 
to go out, he of course, saw the bottles in my 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 241 


hands. I am mentioning these apparently trifling 
details, because under the old Kansas law a case 
against a prohibitory law breaker could not be 
proved except on the evidence of two witnesses. 
When this special case came up before the District 
Court in a long and bitter legal contest on the part 
of the lawyer for the drug stores, Mr. Carruth was 
obliged to confess that he did not see the actual 
passing of the whisky bottles from the drug store 
clerk to me, but he did see me pay him the money 
and the next second saw me with the bottles which 
I had not had a second before. Yet on this tech- 
nicality the case was thrown out, and the drug store 
man declared not guilty, although the Judge, the 
jury, the spectators and everyone in the crowded 
court room knew that the clerk had sold me the 
whisky and that I could not have bought it any- 
where else. (It may be said here that in going over 
this case with us before the trial came off, the county 
attorney strongly advised Mr. Carruth to testify 
that he saw the entire transaction of the purchase, 
saying that unless he testified to seeing the bottles 
pass from the clerk to my hands the case would 
surely go by default. The fact that Mr. Carruth 
refused to lie about the facts has always stood up in 
my mind like a monument of integrity. No one but 
himself and myself would ever have known that his 
testimony was false, and it would have been easy for 
the average man to say that the end justified the 


242 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


means.) A few days after this, while Mr. Carruth 
and myself were securing more evidence from the 
numerous joints in ‘Topeka, to give the county attor- 
ney more cases, he was attacked by the liquor men 
on lower Kansas Avenue, and thrown down and 
handled so roughly that his leg was broken and he 
was invalided at his home for several weeks. Dur- 
ing that entire time while I visited him and went 
over our adventures together, he never expressed a 
moment’s regret over his action in getting evidence, 
and during a period of vicious anonymous letters 
directed to both of us by the liquor element he never 
lost his equanimity or his sense of personal faith in 
the righteousness of his acts. 

The proprietor of the first drug store from which 
we bought a dozen bottles of beer was tried in the 
District Court and found guilty on six counts, which 
under the law meant six hundred dollars and six 
months in jail. He appealed his case to Governor 
Leedy, the Democratic incumbent, and received a 
full pardon, and never paid a dollar of fine or served 
one day in jail. 

The cases against the jointists were vigorously 
prosecuted by the county attorney, and he secured 
over twenty convictions. ‘The county jail became 
crowded. It was during that period that Mr. Car- 
ruth and myself received many threatening letters. 
I investigated the conditions of some of the families 
of the jointists, and found that they were in real 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 243 


need, after the men who had been making a living 
by breaking the law were shut up. I went to my 
Ladies’ Aid Society in the church and asked the 
women if they would be willing to visit some of the 
homes of the convicted jointists and see what they 
needed. ‘They not only did so, but they paid the 
grocery bills and rent of several families, and saw 
that none of them suffered while the men were serv- 
ing out their time. ‘There has been a current so- 
called funny paragraph running through some of 
the daily press making slighting remarks about 
church Ladies’ Aid Societies, but I have never found 
any thing funny about the paragraphs, although I 
have sometimes wondered what funny looking people 
those must be who write the paragraphs. During 
the time that the jointists were in jail I visited them 
there and remember taking books and papers to 
them. I also invited them to come to church when 
they were able. Three of the jointists borrowed 
what at the time seemed like a considerable amount 
of money from me, and it has not been returned. 
But that was only a little over thirty years ago, and 
there is plenty of time yet. 

If any one thinks that Kansas is not a law abiding 
state and that the prohibitory law is not enforced 
at the present time I would advise him to hark back 
thirty years and recall the facts of those times, and 
the fight that the people had with a class of criminals 
including local officials, and a drug store clause to 


244 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


the prohibitory amendment which made law enforce- 
ment not only difficult, but almost impossible. In 
carrying on social settlement work in the Negro dis- 
trict called Tennesseetown near my church [ soon 
found that the lawless element there was hindering 
all our work, and that a specially vicious nest of 
joints was being operated by a Negro jointist, two 
of whose children were in our Kindergarten school 
in Tennesseetown, the first Kindergarten school for 
Negroes west of the Mississippi. 

At this time the Chief of Police in Topeka was 
Mr. Frank M. Stahl, who was a member of my 
church, and another Kansas man whom I greatly 
respected for his courage and convictions. Mr. 
Stahl maintained for many years a Fourth of July 
picnic in a grove on his farm near Topeka, and every 
year on that date a prohibition rally was held there, 
to which thousands of people went, and where the 
principles of prohibition were taught, and sung, and 
debated, and acted with a play put on at night by the 
sons and daughters of the farmers of the community. 

I notified Mr. Stahl of the joints in Tennessee- | 
town and asked him to arrest the owner of the worst 
place. He heard of the impending raid and came 
over to my church study one morning to interview 
me on the subject. He was a burly specimen and 
came at once to the point. 

‘How much do you want for your Kindergar- 
ten?” was his opening remark. 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 245 


I did not exactly understand what he meant, and 
at that time the Kindergarten was in great need of 
funds, as I had exhausted all of my available means 
and did not know where to raise the next hundred 
dollars to pay the next month’s bills, so I told the 
man I could use any amount of money over there. 

He pulled out a roll of bills and said, ‘‘Here’s two 
hundred if you will call Mr. Stahl off my place.” 

I understood in a minute what his question meant, 
and it was the first time a voluntary contribution of 
that size had presented itself to my depleted treas- 
ury. It seemed a little difficult to make him under- 
stand that his money was too tainted to spend on 
training even his own children to walk the straight 
and sober path. Besides, I had been one of a few 
to sympathize with Dr. Washington Gladden at the 
time he created a sensation in Congregational cir- 
cles by denouncing the acceptance of Standard Oil 
money for foreign missions. I pleaded with the 
jointist to clean up his place for the sake of his 
children whom we were trying to make good citi- 
zens, but my plea was not so strong as his attach- 
ment to his joint, and that evening Brother Stahl 
descended on the place and in spite of a bull dog 
guard and a high board fence, the Chief cleaned up 
one dark spot in Tennesseetown, and from that time 
on the jointists began to fade away, and when Carrie 
Nation appeared on the Kansas map a short time 
afterwards, law enforcement generally all over the 


246 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


state became popular and has steadily become the 
habit instead of the occasional practice. Mrs. Na- 
tion is another Kansas person whom I shall always 
like. Even the jointists whose places of business 
she freely advertised and turned into junk stores re- 
spected her. She may have broken the law when she 
broke up a joint and threw her little hatchet through 
the front windows, but I shall always hold her in 
high esteem in comparison with those smug county 
attorneys who helped the jointists break the prohibi- 
tory law by letting their places alone. It is some sat- 
isfaction at the present time to remember that so far 
as known not one recreant county attorney of those 
fighting days who refused to do his sworn duty 
has ever risen out of his political grave dug by 
himself. On the other hand Kansas has no more 
splendid example of the political reward awaiting 
public officials who are not afraid of evil doers, than 
Senator Charles Curtis, who while county attorney 
for Shawnee County, in which Topeka stands, suc- 
cessfully prosecuted the lawbreakers without fear 
or favor, and won the first step towards his present © 
honorable position as the leader of the National 
Senate, respected and loved by Kansas citizens of all 
political faiths. 

I am afraid this chapter has already too many 
logical sequences, but it seems in order here to relate 
an interesting little incident about President Roose- 
velt. It was during the time following his second 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 24:7 


message to the Congress, and at the time when 
Kansas was still fighting its prohibition battle with- 
out any help from the Administration which had 
refused to protect the state law with an interstate 
commerce act, forbidding the shipment of liquor 
from other states into a prohibition state. Mr. 
Roosevelt’s message contained 30,000 words. The 
New York Times and other metropolitan papers 
printed it entire. Other papers printed headings. 
In this message Mr. Roosevelt mentioned a num- 
ber of things that he called a menace to the welfare 
of the nation. He called attention to the loss of our 
merchant marine, the destruction of our forests, the 
labor and industrial conditions, the uncurbed trusts, 
and the race riots. It was a vigorous denunciation 
in the Colonel’s strong and picturesque language of 
certain national wrongs. 

But there was not a word about the saloon, the 
brewery and distillery. Not a sentence about the 
menace of the established and licensed liquor trade. 
And this was before the thought of anything like 
national prohibition. Liquor was still strong in 
politics and in the affairs of cities. 

Reading Mr. Roosevelt’s message clear through 
I was struck more by this silence than by any of his 
thundering assaults on the things he called a menace. 
So in a moment of impulse I wrote him asking 
him why he had not mentioned the liquor trade as a 
menace to the welfare of this republic. I did not 


248 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


expect any reply, but he did answer my letter by 
asking me to come on to Washington and talk the 
matter over. I was getting ready to go when he 
sent word that he had been suddenly called away 
from Washington to the bedside of his son who was 
a student at the Groton school in Massachusetts 
and had been suddenly taken ill there. So I never 
had that talk, which I shall always regret, because 
I know the mind of Mr. Roosevelt was always open 
and in the last years of his life he was a powerful 
champion for national prohibition and rejoiced when 
the measure passed the Congress. 

It was during the second year of Mr. Roosevelt’s 
presidency that Mr. Fred Mitchell and Mr. William 
Johnson, his associate, became deeply interested in 
the life of the Navaho Indians in the Painted desert 
of Arizona. Mr. Mitchell is another Kansas man 
who, if remarkable missionaries were as well known 
and mentioned by the great Press as base ball and 
basket ball heroes, would not have to be written up 
by ministers. Only twenty years ago he and Mr. 
Johnson went out to the Navahos and began a work 
there that stands without a parallel in American 
achievement for reaching and building up the per- 
sonal virtues of a primitive people, who for genera- 
tions had been totally neglected by what we call 
the helpful influences of civilization. ‘This is not 
the place to tell that remarkable story, but inas- 
much as a Kansas man was such a large part of 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 249 


it, and inasmuch as it was a part of my own parish 
experiences, it seems appropriate to tell a part of one 
small incident of the whole. 

The Navahos were threatened by the cattlemen 
of Arizona in the matter of their pasture for their 
sheep. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Mitchell became in- 
terested to such an extent that finally Mr. Johnson 
with three of ‘the old Indians went to Washington 
to see President Roosevelt to help save the valuable 
pastureland on which they had been living for very 
many years. On the way east Mr. Johnson stopped 
over night with me, and told of his reason for the 
trip. 

On the return from Washington, the missionary 
and his three Navahos stopped over again, and told 
in graphic terms the result of their meeting with 
Mr. Roosevelt. The cattlemen had already been to 
Washington to present their side of the claim to the 
land. Mr. Johnson had no lobby and no political 
influence. He went as an individual who wanted 
to see justice done a needy people. Mr. Roosevelt 
gave him a decent hearing, the three old Indians 
supplementing the missionary arguments with their 
own simple story of years of undisputed possession 
of land. After he had heard the whole story, Mr. 
Johnson told me that the President brought down 
his fist on the table and said, ‘“‘These Indians shall 
have their rights!” He sent at once for the papers 
and had an executive order made out, giving the 


250 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Navahos possession of the grazing and pasture land 
so necessary to the very life of their families. The 
beauty and power of that episode in the life of these 
two Kansas men as they touched my parish even 
thus lightly, as they passed like gentle pilgrims 
across our prairies and back to their home in the 
Painted desert with Peshlikietsetti, and Begoetin, and 
Touchiniteel, the old men who had been on to see the 
Great Father, abides with me for long years of 
gracious memory. A great book could be written of 
the romance of these lovers of men, but I do not 
know of any one gifted enough to do it justice. 
It is already an idyl, an epic in American history 
filled with romantic adventure and deep tragedy and 
marks of the cross and the glory of the miracle of 
achievement. It is a tragedy in American everyday 
life that the news of the ball room and of the base 
ball field and of the motion picture world seem to 
be more valuable than stories of human adventure 
in the supernal arena of the surpassing love of man 
for man. Among the almost unbelievable accom- 
plishments of these two young men after less than 
twenty years among the Navahos is a Handbook of 
Navaho Grammar and Dictionary which Mr. 
Mitchell has helped to construct. It is the first time 
these Americans have been able to see their own 
language in print. It is a triumph of patience in 
language study, carried on under tremendous diffi- 
culties, by the side of which trying to find the North 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 251 


Pole or scale Mount Everest is child’s play in a 
flower garden on a summer day in July. 

Sometime during the summer of the year 1910 I 
preached a sermon on the right way to police a city. 
It was considered to be too ideal to be practical. 
That is the common interpretation of ideals. Where- 
as the only things that really work are ideals. My 
belief was then, and is now, that our entire police 
system is wrong, and that instead of placing over 
our cities a group of men whose main business 1s to 
discover crime and help to punish it, we should place 
over our cities a missionary police force of men and 
women, as well equipped to redeem and help man- 
kind as the best educated men and women we send 
abroad to preach and teach the redemptive Gospel. 
Our missionaries abroad work miracles of redemp- 
tion among the most depraved and degraded peoples. 
Why should we not expect to get similar results by 
using the same sort of policemen and policewomen 
in our city force? 

Mr. R. S. Cofran had been elected Mayor of 
Topeka in a three cornered municipal election. The 
day after his election he asked me to come down to 
the Auditorium and when I met him there he urged 
me to accept a place as Police Commissioner. I 
accepted on condition that I would have a free hand 
in helping to appoint policemen and policewomen 
and drawing up rules for their conduct and general 
duties. 


252 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Mayor Cofran gave me every power that his office 
permitted. And I did my best, but it did not amount 
to much, because I had no missionary material out of 
which to make the kind of policeman I believe in. 
I did, however, succeed in having appointed by the 
Mayor one policewoman, Miss Eva Corning, so far 
as I know the first real missionary policewoman in 
any city in the United States. She entered on her 
duties under the handicap of some ridicule and con- 
siderable distrust on the part of the general public, 
but she proved to be an unusually useful and capable 
oficial. Her reports sent back to the Department 
were filled with wise suggestions and during her 
entire service she did a truly remarkable work in 
prevention. If she had been permitted to continue 
for a period of years she would have justified the 
principle of missionary police service, and proved 
my argument for such service as applied to the entire 
police system in our American management of city 
life. | 

While I was Police Commissioner I was associated 
with Hank Lindsay, a professional bondsman for 
jointists, and together we constituted a court, which 
under the city ordinances at that time gave us power 
to try cases and remove officers for cause. We tried 
several such cases, and had the usual amount of 
criticism and advice that goes with such procedure. 
I tried to make rules forbidding the police officers 
from smoking while on duty, and I honestly tried to 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 253 


raise the standard of the force in many ways, but I 
was convinced after my short term of office expired 
that nearly all my plans failed on account of the im- 
possibility of securing the right sort of human ma- 
terial with which to work. Several Washburn Col- 
lege graduates became interested in the idea of police 
service and if I had been able to offer them a really 
living wage for the duties to be performed I think 
a number would have volunteered to enter the busi- 
ness. But the pay at that time for a policeman was 
ridiculously small, and I did not have the heart to 
urge men like college men to go where they would 
be unable to support a family and look forward to 
something like real life. At the same time I shall 
always believe that nothing short of the highest sort 
of training and preparation will be required of the 
missionary police of the future. And I am well con- 
vinced that the saving of the awful waste which is 
now a part of an absurd and stupid method of deal- 
ing with human problems in our cities would more 
than meet the expenses of double the present number 
of city officers who would be paid double the amount 
the present police now receive. I am also convinced 
that the average person who reads this will silently 
say that the whole idea is too ideal and fantastic 
to be carried out in practical life. At the same time 
I have noticed in my study of civilization so far that 
what are called ‘“‘practical’”” methods employed by 
hard headed practical men produce some of the 


254 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


greatest failures known to mankind. The “prac- 
tical’ management of human affairs has so far failed 
to stop war, race hate, international complications, 
industrial disorder, crime, and general depravity. 
The use of ideal methods could not possibly result 
in any thing more stupid and wasteful than the 
practical methods so far employed in the govern- 
ment of nations and cities. For the reasons for my 
convictions on this subject please turn to the teach- 
ings of Jesus, found in an old book called the New 
Testament. 

Almost right across the street from where I live 
in Topeka is Washburn College. During the last 
thirty-five years I have known hundreds of the stu- 
dents, very many of whom have been members of 
my church and active in it. Most of these students _ 
have been farmers’ boys and girls, born and raised 
on Kansas farms or in small Kansas towns. ‘They 
have the Kansas characteristics and speak the lan- 
guage of the prairies, and see a lot of scenery in 
the sky. After this lapse of time, seeing there is 
only one member of the College Board of Trus- 
tees living who was a member of it thirty years 
ago, I hope it may not be considered out of place 
to say that the Board asked me to become president 
of the college, after the death of Dr. Peter Mc- 
Vicar. I did not consider myself rightly equipped 
and trained for such a position and declined the 
invitation, and the Board never made their invita- 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 255 


tion public, for which I was thankful. But all 
through the years I think I can truly say that the 
student life of the College appealed to me strongly 
and if I could have had a free hand to teach and live 
with the students, doing whatever administrative 
duties I was fit to carry on, I might have accepted 
the Board’s offer. But the thought of entering a 
place where most of my time must be spent in 
raising money appalled me, inasmuch as all my life 
I have had all I could do in raising money for my 
own real needs. The confronting of a task that 
demanded ability to raise money for an institution 
daunted me, and I knew without any debate with 
myself or others that I would fail at the very point 
where failure would spell defeat for the college. 

Under Dr. Peter McVicar’s sturdy Scotch adminis- 
tration Washburn grew steadily and many remark- 
able incidents occurred in connection with the student 
body and my church, which would require a book 
larger than this to relate. One of them has, I think, 
no parallel in college history. If the narrative seems 
personal, it is because it was. 

Professor W. E. Cragin was at the head of the 
department of Geology and Applied Sciences. He 
was a most enthusiastic teacher and like the absent 
minded professors you read about. One day he went 
down-town on the horse cars which were drawn 
by a span of mules all the way from the college to the 
Santa Fé depot. He took with him his baby, six 


256 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


months old. When the professor left the car on the 
avenue, he forgot the baby, who was propped up in 
a corner. When the father came home at noon the 
mother naturally asked him where the baby was. 
The professor could not remember the particular car 
in which he had left the baby, but the child was fin- 
ally located after he had had several pleasant round 
trip rides from the college to the Santa Fé. 

But when it came to his keen knowledge of his 
business as a geologist and scientist the Professor 
was not at all absent minded nor incapable of taking 
care of himself. He took up his Topeka Daily 
Capital one morning and read that a large meteorite 
had fallen on a farm in western Kansas. Instantly 
he was interested. ‘he paper did not say how large 
the meteorite was nor what its value probably was, 
but the Professor went at once to the head of the 
college to borrow the necessary funds to make a bid 
for the heavenly visitor and buy it for the college. 

But the President with Scotch caution did not 
wish to advance any amount, so the professor went 
to one of the banks and borrowed the money, $500, 
after asking me to go on the note with him, which 
I did. Which was at least a mark of business sa- 
gacity, seeing he owed over $1200 on old college 
debts and was hard pressed to make payments on 
his regular living expenses. But he reckoned on 
making good from that sky stranger, and the event 
proved that he was justified in staking the future 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 257 


on his gamble with a piece of a star or whatever 
it is that composes meteorites. 

The thing had buried itself near the farmer’s 
house, and was several feet deep in the ground. 
When it had been dug up it was discovered to be as 
large as a good sized blacksmith’s anvil, and was 
indented all over with marks that looked as if red 
hot marbles had been dropped on it when it was 
plastic. The weight of it was over five hundred 
pounds. Cragin dickered with the farmer over the 
price and finally paid him $200 for it. He boxed 
it up and freighted it to Topeka and had it taken out 
to the college, and placed in the physics room. I 
happened to be passing through the hall when the 
meteorite was brought in and the Professor asked 
me to come in and look at it. He was greatly excited 
over his find and in his excitement he confessed what 
I think was a piece of personal college history. He 
said the President had claimed the meteorite as col- 
lege property, but the claim was denied by the Pro- 
fessor who said with some force that he had bought 
the thing with his own money and at his own risk, 
and was going to keep it. The matter was finally 
settled by his ownership being acknowledged, and he 
disposed of parts of the meteorite by dividing it up 
into several pieces which he sold to various colleges 
and museums. ‘The entire amount he received from 
these sales paid up all his college debts, together 
with his loan from the bank, and cleared up several 


258 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


embarrassing accounts in town. At the same time 
it helped me also in an incidental way to meet one or 
two little bills of my own that were troubling me. 
For the story seemed to lend itself to excusable fic- 
tion form, and I sat down the next night and wrote 
what I[ called ‘The Craigston Meteorite,” and sent 
it to the Youth’s Companion. They paid me $100 
for it. It is a poor stone from heaven that cannot 
kill two bills on earth. 

The best reason why I like Kansas is because it has 
been the home of my church for over thirty-five 
years, and where most of my best friends live. I 
have said in a previous chapter but it will bear re- 
peating here,—that I believe no minister ever had 
greater liberty shown him by his people than I re- 
ceived from the people of my parish. Freedom of 
thought and expression is a part of the Kansas at- 
mosphere. I never knew a single moment of fear 
or question in my mind as to the liberty I had to do 
and say what I wanted to. I knew always that the 
strong and individual men in the parish often dif- 
fered from me in matters theological and political, 
and they were not slow in telling me so. But when 
it came to acting on my own initiative in the pulpit 
or in public I knew without their telling me, that 
the field was open without the slightest hint of op- 
position or even advice unless I asked for it. I 
hope I had the sense and christian willingness to do 
that often. But the air of freedom that every min- 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 259 


ister prizes more than an advance in salary, blew 
around me all through the years with the volume 
and freshness of the prairie breezes that start some- 
where in the Rocky Mountains and do not stop until 
they hit the Alleghenys, and begin to get discouraged 
only about the time they reach the New York Pali- 
sades. 

It was with a real sense of losing something out 
of my very structure after a serious illness in the 
year 1918 that I was obliged to resign from my 
pastorate of the Central Congregational Church 
and for several months during a slow recovery, I 
felt like a man without a country, and almost with- 
out a home. It seemed to me that I had better 
revert back to the farm and spend the rest of my 
days somewhere in Adam’s garden. But a call came 
from the Christian Herald of New York to assume 
the place of Editor-in-Chief, which place I accepted 
the first of January, 1920. I have been associated 
with this great religious and family paper ever since 
and at this writing I am Contributing Editor with 
Dr. S. Parkes Cadman and Dr. D. A. Poling and 
Margaret Sangster, all of New York. 

My work on the Herald for five years made it 
necessary for me to go to New York six or seven 
times a year. It is thirty-six hours ride from Kansas 
to New York, and I often wondered why New York 
was so far from the center of the United States. I 
have asked several New York citizens but I have 


260 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


never had a satisfactory answer. My associates 
on the Herald, Mr. Graham Patterson, the Pub- 
lisher, Mr. Rae D. Henkle, the Managing Editor, 
and Dr. Sandison, Editor Emeritus, have been the 
center of a new and interesting group of eastern 
friends. Dr. Sandison, with whom I have been 
closest in terms of correspondence, although nomin- 
ally retired, has in reality filled in many of my duties, 
which my absence from the office has thrown upon 
his kindly shoulders and into his large heart, and I 
wish to place this little flower on his desk that has 
perhaps felt the touch of more human appeal for 
help in times of distress than has ever been known by 
any other editor in this country. 

I wish I could mention by name all the people in 
Kansas to whom I owe inspiration and to whom my 
thought inclines as I finish this exceedingly unfinished 
attempt to tell what I feel. I have never been 
arrested for anything but once, and that was for 
making a U turn on Kansas Avenue in my own home 
town. I was absent mindedly working over an 
article for the Atlantic Monthly on ‘Missionary 
Policemen.” The traffic officer just at that moment 
happened to see me, although he had missed several 
car drivers who had made the same turn when he 
was not there. I think I have never paid five dollars 
more willingly, because I would rather be arrested 
in my own home town than anywhere else. If I 
could think of any better compliment to pay the place 


THE KANSAS CHAPTER 261 


of my residence I would put it down on the blotter 
here. For I believe I can truly say that the spot 
where a man has been married, and where his son 
has been born, and where he has preached for more 
than a quarter of a century,—the spot where he has 
baptized little children, and welcomed disciples into 
the Communion, and performed the marriage cere- 
mony over two thousand times, where he has stood 
with families over their dead, and watched young life 
grow upward into gracious manhood and woman- 
hood, yes,—and even the place where he has been 
arrested, is dearer to him than any other spot, and 
that is my feeling towards Kansas, where the prairie 
wind softly blowing in the clean air on a May morn- 
ing brings to my open study window the perfect 
notes of the meadow lark, and gives me inspiration 
and hope for a better world. Old Chet Thomas once 
said of a certain town in Kansas, ‘‘God has done a 
good deal for this place; man very little,” referring 
to the wondrous beauty of the prairie landscape on 
which the town was built. It is my hope and prayer 
that the men and women of Kansas may work with 
God to make the’inner life of the people of this great 
commonwealth as beautiful.and great as he has made 
the outward boundary four hundred by two hundred 
by four thousand miles stretch of his earthly creation. 


CHAPTER TEN 
THE MINISTER’S CALLING 


I have been asked by many ministers to state my 
working creed in the ministry, and also some of 
the essential factors for the minister’s program. 
That is the reason for this confession and statement. 

My creed after thirty-eight years in the ministry 
is the same as it was after I graduated from Andover 
Theological Seminary in 1886. The only creed that 
has seemed to me to be workable and practical is 
the creed of Jesus,—Love to God and Man. 

The attempt to carry out that creed in everyday 
life has kept me so busy that I have not been inter- 
ested in the theological discussions over the person 
of Christ, the future of the heathen, the evolution 
of man, the exact meaning of the inspiration of the 
Scriptures, or the value of denominationalism. ‘To 
this day I know as little about the scientific theo- 
ries of how man came into existence as the youngest 
‘school boy. All I feel certain about is that God 
breathed into man the breath of life and man became 
a living soul. Just what happened before that, is as 
vague in my mind as the making of nebule of the 


stars or the method by which light came into the 
262 


THE MINISTER’S CALLING 263 


darkness. I have always stood in submissive awe 
before those controversialists who talk about evolu- 
tion as if they had been eye witnesses of the event, 
and had taken stenographic notes of the process, and 
photographs of the way it was done. I retire from 
their dogmatic utterances as from the spectacle of 
superhuman workings. But when it comes to taking 
the sure knowledges the controversialists seem to 
have on all the disputed matters of science and theo- 
logy and translating them into concrete conduct of 
the human race I have never been able to distil a 
single drop of human kindness or love out of their 
little alembics and I have ceased to waste any of 
my time in breaking retorts and spilling acids over 
chemical theology. 

I would not dare to call myself a minister or a 
preacher if I had not at the beginning of my pas- 
torate settled some things clearly in my mind that 
I am able to put down as my concrete program of 
faith and practice in the ministry, all of it based 
on the one great funadmental of love to God and 
man. To make it clear I will state it in a number of 
pledges, if you choose to call them that, which I 
made to myself at the very first of the ministry, that 
to this day I believe apply in a large degree to the 
ministry of the present time. I said to myself: 

(1) I will begin my pastorate with an unques- 
tioning faith in Jesus Christ as the one only power 
in all the world to save it. This faith in Him I will 


264 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


not limit to what has been known as his theological 
power to forgive sins and save men from hell. But 
I will define my Christ as the greatest Statesman 
and Economist of all time, and insist that legislation 
and education and political economy and industry 
look to Him as the one in all the world as holding 
in his teaching the redemption of the world at every 
point. In other words, Jesus in his statement that 
if men sought first the kingdom of God they would 
have all the other material things necessary for hu- 
man happiness, defined himself to be the world’s 
Master mind. He is good for the market place and 
the legislative hall and every place where humans 
struggle and live. It is time, I said to myself, to 
add the name Statesman to the word Redeemer in 
the preaching of Jesus. Heis not a Redeemer unless 
He is a Statesman, for man to be fully redeemed 
must be redeemed socially, and politically, and eco- 
nomically, as well as theologically. 

(2) I will, so far as lies in my power, begin my 
ministry by loving my people. One place where 
many ministers fail is in a failure to have a genuine 
affection for all sorts and conditions of men. If I 
do not really have a feeling of compassion and re- 
gard for every person in my parish there is some- 
thing fatal in my ministry. 

(3) I will spend much time in prayer. I will 
never be too busy to find time for prayer. I will 
pray alone and with groups of my people in their 


THE MINISTER’S CALLING 265 


homes. Whether I can ever get many of my people 
to come to what is called a prayer meeting held in a 
church room will be of very little concern to me if 
I can train them to pray with me when I make my 
calls on them, or when they come into my study to 
confer with me over some church matters. And I 
will allow nothing to interfere with a period of 
prayer on Sunday morning or evening just before 
the preaching services. At that period I will shut 
the door on all other matters, and with a chosen few 
of the spiritually minded in my church family we will 
pray for the divine blessing on the message of the 
day. May I also say that if I were to go back into 
the pastorate again I would change many habits 
connected with prayer life. 

I would use the Sunday morning service often for 
a prayer service, because I have come to believe that 
in the American pulpit there is far too much preach- 
ing and too little praying. I would, without previous 
notice, on some Sundays in the morning when the 
church was filled with people who had heard preach- 
ing ever since they were born, lay my sermon aside, 
tell the organist not to play or the choir to sing, 
give out no notices, leave the morning offering to be 
given as the people went out, and say to the people, 
‘Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath.’ Therefore 
let us spend this gracious hour in prayer.’ And I 
have faith enough to believe that if that were done 
spontaneously in every pulpit in America not once or 


266 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


twice but often, we would be having the greatest 
revival in the history of the church. But we are 
too cowardly and too much slaves of habit and of 
custom to break away from it all into the region 
of angelic and heavenly things. The weakness of 
my own ministry at any point of weakness I attribute 
to my neglect. of prayer in the preparation of my 
sermons and the making of plans for the welfare of 
the people. 

(4) I will emphasize the work of the preacher 
as teacher instead of orator and speaker. And in 
doing that I will teach my children, using my own 
Bible School as my constant material. 

That meant turning the morning preaching serv- 
ice into a teaching period for several months in the 
year. It meant having the Bible School condense 
its time into forty minutes and then coming into 
the church auditorium for the eleven o'clock service. 
Then with all classes seated with their teachers or 
department superintendents, we would have an hour 
or more of a religious service using the stately hymns 
of the church, and teaching instead of preaching. 
The end and aim of all the services as long as they 
lasted being to reach decisions to live the Christian 
life, joining the Church, and beginning to be a 
disciple. 

Again, if I were to be given the privilege of enter- 
ing the active ministry again I would spend at least 
half my time teaching my children and young peo- 


THE MINISTER’S CALLING 267 


ple and preaching to the grown up people only half 
the time. For that reason I would not try to hold 
a second preaching service, especially if I had only 
the church membership for my hearing, but I would 
do as I did for twenty-five years, meet groups of 
young men and women Sunday evenings and teach 
them and train them to be Christian business men, 
statesmen, journalists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, 
and missionaries. 25 or 50 or 100such young people 
who would be willing to spend two or three hours 
every Sunday evening with me being instructed in 
the Christian life would be a greater and more 
valuable audience than 1000 people brought together 
to be entertained or lured into the building by a 
musical or literary service. On thinking it over I 
believe if I were doing it again I would teach my 
children and my young people at least three fourths 
of the year instead of one-half. 

(5) I will try to do in between two Sundays the 
most important part of my ministry. I will ask my 
people to free me from formal pastoral calls, and 
let me use my time and strength in calling on the 
sick, the shut in and the afflicted. I will meet the 
people who are well and able to go to church and to 
meetings at those places, but in between the Sun- 
days I will ask the people to give me perfect free- 
dom to do those things that will result in the great- 
est results as I see them for the welfare of the peo- 
ple as a whole. If the people cannot trust me to 


268 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


use my time in the best ways, they had better never 
have called me to be their pastor. 

In accordance with this plan of making the most 
of the days of the week, I will write very many let- 
ters to my men, not letters of complaint or criticism 
or faultfinding, but letters of commendation and of 
Christian cheer. I will also spend a good part of 
every day out of doors instead of in a close study 
room. 

(6) I will make it my business to know the Bible 
better than any man in my congregation. When it 
comes to reading books I will read only those that 
minister to life. There are not many such books 
so it happens that in the course of the years, my 
library is small. In fact I have always found more 
sermons in people than in books, unless I could find 
the people in the books. And as far as I have gone 
the books that contain material for preaching and 
teaching are so rare that a five-foot book shelf is not 
necessary. I am talking of teaching and preaching 
material in books. There are interesting and worth 
while things in many books old and new, and they 
are a part of the minister’s reading. But when it 
comes to books that really give the minister subjects 
for teaching the young or the old, they can be stood 
up within a space measured by the minister’s out- 
stretched arms held parallel with each other. That 
distance depends somewhat on the width of a min- 


THE MINISTER’S CALLING 269 


ister’s shoulders, and each man can measure it for | 
himself. 

But the Bible contains the entire story of man’s 
need, of his development, of his sinning and his re- 
demption and his future. I have thought often in 
the flood of books and book sellers that have laid 
siege to my time and my salary that if all the books 
ever printed were destroyed except the Bible I would 
not weep over it. I would still have my teaching 
library. There are hundreds of men in my congre- 
gation who know far more than I can ever learn 
about law and medicine and science and business, and 
literature, but I will allow no one of them nor all 
of them together to know more about the Bible than 
I do, so that when I go up into my pulpit I will go 
with the tread of a conquerer conscious in my mind 
and heart that I am the superior of every person 
in my congregation in a knowledge of the Scriptures. 

May I be allowed to express my heretical views 
on the habit of book reading indulged in by many 
ministers. I think much of it is overdone and a 
great deal of it is a waste of time and power. There 
are hundreds of ministers in our churches at the 
present time whose sermons are nothing but diluted 
reviews of diluted books. The years go by and the 
one great source of wisdom for the preacher is neg- 
lected while he pays his hard won coin for books 
that do not nourish the heart or stimulate the mind. 
And when he gets his sermons out of thought that 


270 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


is the thought of a writer who many times has never 
had a vision of spiritual life it seems to me like 
a tragedy to go before a congregation and call a 
book review a sermon, or a magazine article 
teaching. 

(7) I will take the greatest possible care of my 
body in order to preserve for my people and the 
calling to which I am called, a well governed ma- 
chine, not liable to break down or wear out before 
its usefulness is exhausted. Ministers as a class 
are good insurance risks, and often head the list 
in the actuaries’ tables, but on the other hand many 
of them fail in the ministry on account of failure to 
regard their bodies as temples of the Holy Ghost. I 
have found that a good horseshoe game every after- 
noon with a neighbor, has been worth more to me 
than golf or walking, and the expense is only nomi- 
nal. In any case the minister of all men needs to 
keep his body in shape, for the strain is enormous 
and he needs, if any man does, a physical endurance 
that will prevent depression, and at the same time 
be a constant example to his own people of Christian 
strength. 

In this connection I did not add it to my pledges 
as so far given under the caption of “I will,” but I 
have added it since, and that is, a place in the Chris- 
tian program in the parish for the teaching of health 
and healing. ‘The Christian ministry need not be — 
afraid to teach the healing power of God on the 


THE MINISTER’S CALLING 271 


body through prayer. At what time in the history 
of the Christian life has bodily healing as a part 
of the church teaching been dismissed? It is still 
there, neglected and in some cases looked upon with 
fear and even disapproval. But it is a part of the 
Christian faith. I believe that the minister of today 
has as much right to pray for recovery of the sick 
in his parish as any minister in Paul’s time or in 
the early centuries of the history of the church. 
Again, if I were back in my parish and could select 
the right men and women to assist me, I would main- 
tain regularly a healing clinic of some sort, and 
make prayer and faith regnant at the center of it. 

(8) I will set apart a regular time and conse- 
crate it to the human needs of any human being in 
the parish for the confessional of the soul’s needs. 
By this I mean what I tried to carry out for many 
years in the establishment of a Sunday afternoon 
period when any one in the parish who wanted to 
confess his need could come to the church study and 
find an opportunity to give his soul’s or mind’s or 
body’s need the relief of telling it to the minister 
with the hope of receiving help before he went 
away. 

I believe one of the greatest sources of the min- 
ister’s inspiration and one of the greatest sources of 
the Protestant church power is being missed because 
we do not open a door of hope to the people in our 
parishes. The Protestant church should have a 


272 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Protestant Confessional. Not a confessional where 
the minister stands like a priest between the soul 
and his divine need of forgiveness for sin, but a 
confessional where the minister meets the people of 
his parish who are in trouble of any sort and they 
come to him to confess their need and ask for divine 
and human help. 

Sunday afternoon I have found in many ministers’ 
lives is a vacant period, and in most parishioners’ 
lives it is the one time when they can make time 
for just such a meeting with the minister as I have 
tried to describe. What better use could be made 
of the whole of Sunday afternoon than a meeting, 
generally by previous appointment, with any one 
who wanted to come and unburden the spirit to one 
who could minister as even near and dear relatives 
could not do. And during many years of such min- 
istration in my own parish I can think of nothing 
in all my experience that remains with me as_source 
of joy of heart like those hours spent with troubled 
souls that came and broke down the stony walls of 
custom and isolation and revealed the hunger they 
had carried for long years in their desire to tell to 
another the heartache or the fear or the need that 
could not be told to any one but the minister. Many 
of these confessions were too sacred and personal 
to be made public. Many of them were at the 
time without the relief of immediate answer. But | 
none of them was useless, and in a host of cases the: 


THE MINISTER’S CALLING 273 


confessional became a place of glorious light break- 
ing into a lifetime of terrible darkness, and those 
who came into the little room with fear and tremb- 
ling went away with smiles of hope and new faces 
shining through the rainbows of their tears. By all 
means, let us have a Protestant Confessional. Why 
should Protestantism be deprived of a source of 
power which the Catholic church has understood and 
used with mighty influence all these centuries? And 
the Protestant Confessional will commend itself to 
those of our faith because it does not include within 
the term any assumption of a priesthood standing 
between a soul and forgiveness of sin but rather a 
confessional that ought to make more possible the 
drawing near to the divine of the human being put- 
ting himself at once within the tender embrace of 
Him who not only holds all his children in the hollow 
of his hand but within the gracious bend of his arm. 

The program of a minister’s life would be incom- 
plete unless it contained in it at all times the eternal 
optimism of his faith. Therefore I pledged myself 
at the very beginning of my ministry that no matter 
what happened in my own local parish or any where 
out in the great world I would never lose my faith in 
the ultimate victory of the things that Jesus lived 
and died for. If my ministry could not carry with 
it always the impression of beating the devil and 
saving the world, I declared to myself at the very 
beginning I had no call to be a minister. Whatever 


274 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


else I have held to or let go as the years have sped, 
I am glad to say I have never doubted the final 
victory of good over evil. If I could not preach 
and teach a Christ who could and would draw all 
men up unto himself, I had no Christ to preach 
worth talking about. If I ever went into my pulpit 
(and I confess I did more than once), to voice my 
doubts and fears over a world sunk in wickedness, 
I always went down again ashamed of a message 
that made my people go out with troubled hearts to 
face another week of temptation and struggle. So 
that after the first few years I came to know that 
a sermon that contained the note of triumph and 
hope and overcoming was never lost. The minister 
can never wear his people out with the sermon that 
gives them hope. He faces every time he gets up to 
speak, souls that are in need of courage and cheer. I 
hope to be forgiven by a merciful High Priest for 
the few times I have preached my fears. But I 
know he does not expect me to apologize to any one 
for the number of times I have repeated myself in 
saying the same words of the same text, “Be of 
good cheer. I have overcome the world.” 

In summing up the program of my ministry I find 
myself very hopeful for the place of the church and 
the preacher and teacher. If I were beginning life 
again I do not know of any place where I would pre- 
fer to begin better than in the ministry. In spite of 
the sectarianism of the churches, in spite of the lack 


THE MINISTER’S CALLING 275 


at present of a united program of world wide mis- 
sionary campaign, in spite of the absence of what 
may be called high grade evangelism, in spite of 
formalism and isolation and lack of vision of what 
the church stands for, I do not know anything more 
vital to the world’s happiness and its civilization 
than the church and the ministry within it. I do 
not believe the young man looking into the callings 
of life will be attracted to this great calling on ac- 
count of its outward rewards, or because of its social 
dignity and its unrivaled opportunity for study and 
contact with social forces. But if he hears the call 
and obeys it, it will be because he sees in the min- 
istry the one best place in all the world to put 
Jesus’ creed of love to God and Man to the test. 
If it will not stand that test, then the church had 
best shut up its doors and the minister begin to 
mix mortar or lay brick. But the Master’s creed 
will sometime be followed, and along that faith the 
minister of the future will find his ambition met in 
the greatest calling known to mankind, because it 
is the same calling that He followed, who went about 
teaching the good news. 


CHAPTER ELEVEN 


THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A ROMANCE 
BY MRS. SHELDON 


The old stage coach left at six-thirty in the morn- 
ing, and it would take three hours for me to reach 
my destination, a distance of eighteen miles. As I 
bumped along over the rough road in the uncom- 
fortable old coach to the little New England village 
at the foot of Camel’s Hump, the little village where 
my Grandmother, my father’s mother lived, I little 
knew that I was journeying to meet my future hus- 
band. I was also to visit other interesting relatives 
in this little village, on my mother’s side. One of 
the old Governors of Vermont, and his son, a famous 
senator from Vermont, were her own uncle and 
cousin. 

The Congregational church of this village was lo- 
cated on one of the pleasant shady streets, and as 
it happened, my Grandmother’s home was on one 
side of the church, and the Governor’s on the other 
side. And as I think of it now, the young minister 
of this church, as he went back and forth on his © 


work for the parish could not escape me, as he had 
276 


THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A ROMANCE 277 


to pass one of these houses several times a day. But 
I am getting ahead of my story. 

I had made several visits before this one to my 
Grandmother, and one of the pleasant memories I 
had taken away was the remembrance of rides in 
company with other young people over the shady 
roads and steep hills around the town with the min- 
ister of the Congregational church behind his old 
pony Bly. The minister was an elderly man who 
loved to do nice things for people, especially young 
people. He liked that rather better than writing 
sermons. I often think today as I think of him 
that preaching is not much unless a little love and 
kindness goes with it. 

Upon my arrival at Grandmother’s for this visit, 
breakfast was waiting for me. Grandmother looked 
just as she always had, with her white cap, or rather 
her black cap, for the white one was put on later in 
the day. Her white apron was as spotless as ever, 
and she had the same appearance of calmness and 
dignity that she always possessed. I admired my 
Grandmother, she never seemed to me to work, her- 
self, but her housekeeping ran like clockwork, so 
she must have been a good executive. Grandmother 
always seemed so in order herself that I could never 
have thought of throwing myself into her arms for 
a good hug. I was an impetuous young girl, my 
brown hair was curly, and not always in perfect 
order, so perhaps that bond of something which 


278 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


draws people together was not as strong between 
Grandmother and me as it might have been. 
Grandmother’s chief interest was her church, so it 
was perfectly natural for her as we were having 
breakfast together to make the remark that their 
new minister was often in the habit of dropping in 
on Monday morning. That was the first I knew that 
there was a new minister, and I was at once filled 
with regret that my old friend was no longer there. 
I had liked his wife, too, for she was always attrac- 
tive. She was at that time my ideal of what a min- 
ister’s wife should be. She was plump and smiling 
and had excellent taste in dress. My own minister’s 
wife at home was very thin and had a long face, 
and never had attractive clothes. I found out after- 
ward that she was at heart quite gay, but dared not 
show it for fear of shocking the congregation. 
Well, of course, Grandmother’s remark about the 
minister’s dropping in did not interest me in the /east. 
Now that my old friend was gone, I had no further 
interest in ministers any way, and none in this one 
in particular. At the Governor’s there was an 
attractive young man studying law, that I was look- 
ing forward to seeing. Not that I was in love with 
him, but like any girl I considered an attractive 
young man an asset to the town one is going to 
visit. | | 
After breakfast I went to take out my dresses 
and hang them away, and to put my little toilet 


THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A ROMANCE 279 


articles in place in my room, so as to make myself 
feel at home in Grandmother’s house for the month 
I was to stay. Then I went down to the living 
room where the long mirror hung on one side of the 
room and the big square piano stood on the other 
side. The black haircloth sofa was in the same place 
where it had stood for years, and not far away the 
old-fashioned rocker by the side of a little stand on 
_ which the old Bible always lay. I can see my Grand- 
mother now seated by that table reading her Bible. 

When I came down to the living room Grand- 
mother was sitting there and as I came in she began 
at once talking about the minister. ‘‘We like him 
very much,” she said, and added hastily, ‘But he 
has been very careful since he came in regard to 
showing any attentions to the young women in the 
church, so you must not feel hurt if he does not show 
YOU any attention.” 

“Grandmother!” I cried, ‘What do you mean? I 
do not want attention from a minister!” 

“But he is young,” said Grandmother, “And we 
think him very nice. We think he acts very wisely 
in regard to young women. You know in time they 
might make him a great deal of trouble if he were 
not careful.” 

‘Well, Grandmother, do not worry about me, I 
am not interested,” I said, just as a peal from the 
front door bell rang through the house. It was true 
I was not interested. Grandmother had drawn, to 


280 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


my young mind, the picture of a very conceited young 
man, expecting every girl to fall in love with him. 
I knew the ringing of that front door bell announced 
the arrival of someone. I had the desire to run, fly, 
anything to avoid the risk of meeting what I 
imagined to be a solemn, pale-faced minister. And 
if Grandmother had been like some women, I should 
have done so. But as she said in her dignified way, 
“T think he has come,” I could see no way of escape, 
and in a moment was looking into the face of a 
smiling young man with the figure of an athlete. I 
looked him over. Dark hair, blue eyes, good chin, 
firm and strong, rather awkward, smile a pleasant 
one. He seemed perfectly natural with Grand- 
mother, but I noticed he did not seem at ease with 
me, and I did not help him in the way of conver- 
sation, meekly listening to his chat concerning affairs 
of the church Grandmother was interested in, the 
tennis match he was to play with some one (I learned 
afterwards he was a champion at tennis). ‘The sub- 
ject of baked beans was introduced. It seems Grand- 
mother was in the habit of having him as a guest 
once a week when she served the real Boston kind, 
and he was evidently anticipating the event. I could 
see from his conversation that the advent of a young 
woman in the house was in no way to interfere in © 
his mind with this weekly feast of his favorite dish. 

As I noticed this trait of determination I looked 
again at his black hair and blue eyes, and said to 





MARY ABBY MERRIAM 
(MRS. CHARLES M. SHELDON) 





MERRIAM WARD SHELDON 


THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A ROMANCE 281 


myself, “Irish! Probably Scotch-Irish!” And I 
guessed right. Born in New York state but with 
Scotch-Irish ancestry on both sides. I do not know 
how long that call lasted. Years, as I think of it 
now. He seemed to bring all his worries and troubles 
to be ironed out by Grandmother. I recall his story 
of woe regarding his tennis. In company with two 
law students (one of them I have referred to as liv- 
ing at the Governor’s), he had been in the habit of 
playing tennis late in the afternoon almost every day. 
An old deacon in the church had severely taken him 
to task for this, saying it was not a Christian thing 
for a minister to play tennis. I fear I gave him a 
sympathetic look at this point in the conversation, 
without meaning to, for he seemed for a moment to 
be considering a polite remark directed to me, but 
thought better of it and hastily began discussing the 
advisability of keeping or selling pony Bly. Old 
pony Bly had been presented to him by the former 
minister, my old friend. It was not as generous an 
act, however, as at first it might seem, for she was 
too old to sell, she had that nervous disease, spring- 
halt, which made driving behind her somewhat nerve- 
racking, and she had a good appetite which made 
her a somewhat expensive luxury, for a young man 
on a salary of eight hundred. But the hills were 
long and stony and steep, leading to the rural mem- 
bership of the church, where he was expected to make 
frequent calls. 


282 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


I do not recall that Grandmother gave him very 
satisfactory advice, but her attentive and sympa- 
thetic ear seemed to give him the comfort he needed. 
I could see why he came to call on her Monday 
morning. 

Her advice and sympathy started him on the 
week’s work in the right state of mind, and as the 
days went on, I saw a good deal of him as his visits 
to Grandmother were very frequent. He wanted 
the village to have a Library. He wanted it to 
have a street sprinkler. He wanted it to have a 
hearse. At his last funeral the casket had slipped 
off the wagon going up a steep hill. That seemed 
to get on his nerves a bit. So he was trying to get 
money for all these things and spending his own as 
freely as if he were a millionaire. 

I remember when evening came this first day of 
my visit, Grandmother referred again to pony Bly. 
‘Although our minister has a horse and buggy,” 
(no one in that little town ever said ‘carriage’) “he 
has never taken a young lady out to ride. He is 
very careful to avoid gossip.” 

I could see the trend of Grandmother’s remarks 
to warn me not to accept any such attentions from 
him. I know her intentions were the best in the 
world. But, Grandmother dear, long since laid to 
rest, I wonder how far you may be responsible for 
what followed a few years later. This I know,— 
the young minister was invited by Grandmother to 


THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A ROMANCE 32832 


her house many times during my visit, and what was 
my surprise one afternoon to be invited by him to 
drive with him behind pony Bly in the “buggy” 
which Grandmother had pronounced free from vil- 
lage gossip. 

The days between my first introduction and this 
daring invitation were filled with all kinds of social 
events with the young people of the town. It wasa 
nice little town with many cultured people who gave 
it an atmosphere far above that of many other small 
places. Reading Clubs and musical programs fur- 
nished our entertainments for many an evening. 
Grandmother was always on guard for her minister. 
She gave me many a serious talk on the sin of leading 
a young man on, to break his heart in the end. I 
think she put him on a pedestal and was only willing 
that we should occasionally take a look at him, being 
careful at the same time not to make eyes at him. 
Since that time I have seen the wisdom in the atti- 
tude the young minister took toward the social side 
of his life. For there were very attractive young 
women perfectly willing to lead him on to a more 
intimate friendship if he so desired. One of these 
girls was my best friend, beautiful and good, and 
would have made a lovely minister’s wife. I have 
often wondered why he did not see it. 

One evening after hearing the story of his life as 
a boy on a lonely Dakota ranch where every thing 
was hard, and where the thing one wanted must be 


284 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


put out of mind, and just the necessities indulged in, 
I could see where that strength of will to keep free 
from what desires he might have had for compan- 
ionship among them had been acquired. He evi- 
dently was not going to have it said that he had 
broken any girl’s heart, and he was going to keep his 
own intact. Something, he told himself he must wait 
for, as he had waited for things on the ranch. Eight 
hundred dollars was not enough to permit even a 
thought in that direction, especially when much of 
it was being spent on village improvements. 

Grandmother had been giving a party for me one 
evening. The young minister was there, and as he 
had not brought a young lady with him, he had no 
one to take home, so he lingered after the others 
had left to congratulate Grandmother over the suc- 
cess of her party, and what was my surprise upon 
her leaving the room, to have him say, “I should 
like to have you take a drive with me if you would 
enjoy to.” 

“But,” I said, “I understand you have never taken 
a young lady for a drive. It is against your prin- 
ciples.” 

“Yes,” he said, “That is very true. But then you 
see, I had not met you, and you are from out of 
town, you know.” | 

What would Grandmother say? I turned it over 
in my mind. I should feel guilty to be the one to 
ruin his reputation by accepting his invitation, but 


THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A ROMANCE 285 


some evil spirit made me say quickly, “Yes, thank 
you, [ll go.” To this day I remember how Grand- 
mother looked when I told her. “I fear,” she said, 
‘he has been unwise.” 

Well, if it was an evil spirit that prompted me to 
go, it went along too, and tortured me all the way. 
Here I was driving down the main street with the 
young minister who had never taken into his buggy 
to sit by his side any young lady in the whole two 
years he had lived and worked among his people. 
Now I was shamelessly sitting there, and pony Bly 
was heartlessly kicking the dashboard with her 
springhalt foot, calling attention to our drive. But 
the guilty look I expected on the minister’s face was 
not there. I seemed to feel that the burden of it 
all rested on me. It was a wretched drive for me, 
but I tried to hide my feelings by being specially 
gay. 

‘“T have enjoyed this immensely, and I hope you 
will go with me again,” he said, as he left me at 
Grandmother’s door. [I little thought as I thanked 
that young minister for taking me on that awful 
buggy ride that one day I should be crossing oceans 
by his side, on our way to far off lands and really 
enjoying it too. Grandmother never knew about 
that. 

For the rest of my visit, which had nearly come 
to an end, I was an object of great interest in the 
village, to be gazed at in church and everywhere by 


“286 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


people who had not up to this time heard of me. 
For in a small town news travels fast, and the word 
had been spread abroad that I had been asked to 
ride in the minister’s buggy behind pony Bly, and 
that we had driven through the town and out into 
the country. 

As I said in the beginning of my story it took 
three hours for the old stage coach to take me from 
Grandmother’s house back to my own home. My 
visit was over and I was now on my way, bouncing 
along over the rough hilly roads. I had said good- 
bye to the young minister, never expecting to see him 
again. J had declined taking the second drive with 
him, my courage failed me at the thought of it. 
Grandmother said she thought it was best I had not 
encouraged him, as she feared I was not serious 
enough to make a minister’s wife. I respected my 
Grandmother, but I could not help exclaiming, 
‘““Grandmother, he has seen too much that is serious, 
and won’t be looking for that when he looks for a 
wife. But I would not marry a minister if he were 
the only man left in the world!” 

I feared from the look Grandmother gave me 
that I was never to be the same to her again. I did 
all I could to make friends by putting my arms 
around her and telling her it wasn’t so much the 
minister, but the awful people who criticised min- 
isters and their wives. Then I told her how I had 
suffered driving down Main Street in that buggy. 


THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A ROMANCE 287 


That was the last time I saw my Grandmother. I 
wish I had known before, that she liked to have me 
put my arms around her and let her know what 
was in my heart. We might have been nearer each 
other if I had not been so afraid of her cap and 
apron, and if she had understood that I was young. 

As the old coach rattled along I had nothing to 
do but think of the past month. I thought of the 
young lawyer, who one day when I was sitting at 
the piano, had come up behind me and kissed my 
cheek. I thought I should be afraid to trust him. 
I thought of the rich young man of the town who 
had showered some attentions upon me, but he was 
short, and I did not like short men. I thought of 
the girl friends who had not been quite so friendly 
since my ride in the buggy, and that made me think 
of the minister. 

Yes, he had been very nice, I hadn’t anything 
against him. He would probably take some other 
girl out in the buggy some day. Yes, he was Scotch- 
Irish, and if he wanted a wife who was not serious 
he would have her, of course, that is, if he could get 
her. I liked his chin. He was a very strong young 
man, but he was very gentle with Grandmother. 
He will never save his money. He is really very 
impractical. Well, I’m glad I met him. 

Where was I? Inthe buggy? Oh, I remember; 
in the old stage coach, and it had stopped to let a 
passenger off who had been riding on top. Now 


288 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


we were stopping at our gate. Mother dear was 
picking flowers in the yard. 

Then father came out and took my satchel up to 
the door for me. ‘Did you like their new min- 
ister?” father said, looking straight at me. 

‘“‘Not much, father,’ I said, and as I said it I 
noticed a relieved look on father’s face. Father had 
already selected a young business man in our village 
as a son-in-law and as a husband for his only 
daughter. I did not realize then that the young 
minister was to cross my path scon again. 

But he was Scotch-Irish and if he wanted a wife 
he was going to have one,—that is, if he could get 
her. 


CHAPTER TWELVE 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 


(This chapter on ‘““Two Old Friends” is included 
in this edition because so many of the author’s 
friends who heard it read, and afterwards saw it 
published in the Christian Herald asked for it in the 
book publication. ) 


Next to the word “Love” the word ‘Friend’ 
stands resplendent in human experience. Ina world 
of sordid and self-seeking ambitions, it is a source of 
mighty satisfaction to know that there is one thing 
that cannot be bought with money nor won by 
power. Friendship mocks at the gift of gold and 
walks calmly by the throne of earthly ambition. It 
is the one priceless boon which mortals have received 
from the treasury of the Almighty. 

It isnot of this personal human friendship, how- 
ever, that I am going to speak, but of Two Old 
Friends who have always been considered by the 
majority of mankind as enemies to be feared and 
hated and fought off as long as possible. And the 
names of these two old friends are Old Age and 


Death. 
289 


290 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


Say what we will to others or to ourselves as we 
whistle to keep up our courage walking past the 
graveyard of Youth, we do not like this plan of life 
which leaves us about where we began, “Sans teeth, 
sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” 

But taking all this at its worst and in the face of 
the experience of mankind which is against any such 
determination, I have made up my mind to regard 
Old Age as a friend, and cultivate him with cheerful 
and fearless equanimity. I may not always be able 
to keep up the appearance before him that I would 
wish, but it will not be for lack of an honest attempt 
to doso. And in order to dismiss most of the dread 
of him that the majority of mankind feel, I have 
mapped out the following program for myself, 
which I trust may secure for my heart and mind 
some resources that even Youth itself could not give 
me. 

The physical let-down that goes with approaching 
old age is one of the factors that makes it dreadful 
to multitudes. I, therefore, am determined to keep 
the bodily machine in good working order as long 
as possible. I do not know of any miracle that will 
preserve my hearing or my eyesight or digestion 
from gradual loss of power, but I do know that cer- 
tain habits over which I have some control will tend 
to physical pleasure and power, especially in the mat- 
ters of exercise, diet and work. 

After trying tennis and finding it too strenuous; 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 91 


golf, and finding it too financial; walking and finding 
it too solitary; riding and finding it too risky, I have 
at last settled on horseshoes, and find it a noble 
game, even as the horse itself is a noble animal. 
Any one who has fifty feet of backyard and five dol- 
lars can start the game. He needs the fifty feet to 
lay out a forty-foot course, and five dollars to buy 
four standard shoes, for of course, horseshoes can- 
not be played alone to the best advantage. It takes 
a neighbor, or three of them, to make the game in- 
teresting, and beats every other form of social con- 
tact with a man’s neighborhood. The game is classic 
and calls for skill of a high-brow order. Any man 
who can throw two pounds and a half of iron forty 
feet and make ringers every other throw is entitled 
to be a descendant of a Greek king, for the old 
Greek discus is the father of the horseshoe, and the 
discus was thrown by kings, and they used to get so 
excited over the game that they forgot their crowns 
in contending for the laurel wreath, which was the 
winner’s only reward. 

A good deal is said about a man’s diet as he grows 
older. Very fortunately I have been blest all my 
life with a digestion that has never had to weigh 
calories. But I am beginning to find out that the 
less I eat of anything, even of the things I like, the 
better I feel and the more I cando. And here again 
if I am going to keep the machine going in good 
order I hope to have sense enough not to eat myself 


292 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


under the table. I find that almost a vegetable 
and fruit diet is the best for my well-being, and the 
meat packers could all go out of business without 
disturbing my menu. 

The only thing in this connection that I fear is the 
banquet. It is a deadly animal to be avoided as 
much as possible. When it is unavoidable I take 
refuge in stirring up the thing called a “‘compote,” 
and when I get home drink a glass of milk, eat an 
apple, try to forget the old, old stories the speakers 
told, and go to bed and to sleep. 

In the matter of work I reckon on staving off Old 
Age or of welcoming his advances by keeping my 
mind busy with a variety of work. One of the com- 
monest habits of old age is to accept a monotony of 
program, and one of the reasons why many men and 
women lose their interest in life and grow old before 
they get old is because they have never cultivated 
a habit of being interested in everything that belongs 
to the life of man on the earth. 

If I get tired of writing editorials or admonishing 
the sinner of the error of his ways, it is a relief to 
me, and perhaps to him, if I get up from my desk 
and study a marine coral or go out into my backyard 
and saw wood for my study hearth or fix the furnace 
or write something for the Youth’s Companion 
which has nothing to do with reforming the uni- 
verse, or take up a course of study in the near-by 
college on Chinese music. 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 293 


Whatever it may be that keeps my mind and body 
interested in using a set of new or unused muscles or 
thoughts is helpful in the program of making Old 
Age a Friend. It is not possible to avoid him, but 
it may be possible to forget him by being pre- 
occupied with an endless variety of occupations. 

We now come to a feature of Old Age which may 
perhaps best be described by using the doubtful 
word, indifference. If that is not just the right 
word, try some of these: Irresponsibility. Let- 
ting go. Standing back. ‘The right to repose. 

And all of these words and phrases need to be 
explained, but the explanation is easy, even if the 
application is not accepted by a majority of those 
for whom it is made. But stated somewhat clumsily 
what I mean is simply the right which Old Age gives 
to his friend of letting youth have its turn at the oar 
or the wheel or the lever or whatever it is that 
makes the old universe go straight. 

To try it again, I begin to find that it is perfectly 
proper for a man after he has reached a certain 
period to feel perfectly easy in his soul if he is not 
always down at the town hall in the interest of social 
welfare. And the time comes when to my mind a 
man is perfectly justified in resigning from commit- 
tees and societies and programs and settling down 
into his easy chair when night comes with his fa- 
vorite author, while youth, enthusiastic, rash, fiery, 
optimistic, political, grandiloquent, ‘‘enchanted” 


294 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


youth as Hugh Walpole calls him, takes the world in 
hand to wallop it or to caress it, while I sit at home 
and lose no time in envy or regret, because some- 
one else is on the Board of Managers where I used 
to sit and make motions and think the whole blamed 
thing would go to the Soviet if I were not there to 
steer it from the front seat and the back. 

I do not like the idea of Youth shoving me off 
the bench where I have been sitting so long, and in 
order to keep from being shoved, I think it is more 
dignified and pleasant to get up quietly as I see him 
coming, and walk majestically away, giving him the 
impression that I am going because I have a more 
important engagement elsewhere. I have known 
some old men to have many unpleasant experiences 
because they did not know that their time was up. 

“Listen to me,’’ says Old Age, bluntly. “You 
have had your day. Why hang around where you 
are not needed or at least wanted? You ought to 
be thankful to be called on occasionally now and 
then to say grace or pronounce the Benediction, but 
some one else has been chosen to give the speech 
of the evening. You have had your turn. Let up. 
Or, in other words, let down. Relax. Enjoy leisure. 
How is Youth to have any room with your old hulk 
blocking up the gangway. Move on, or up, or out, 
or down, or away—anything but staying where you 
used to be. It is Youth’s turn. Don’t begrudge it 
but be glad to catch your breath for a little before 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 295 


you draw it again in the land where youth is 
eternal.” 

Good advice I say. Old Age, you said a brain 
full. The delight of watching Youth tackle the 
same problems that we sweat over belongs to the 
onlooker. And if I have sense enough to know that 
I am entitled to a seat on the bleachers where now 
and then I may shy something at the Umpire, it will 
smooth the reposeful years as they come on, free 
from anxiety or responsibility, and no longer under 
the pressure of that old obligation that Hamlet 
voiced when he cried out: 


‘The time is out of joint, 
O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right!” 


Youth, it is your innings! Go to it, and beat the old 
"un, if you can! 

And now that we are on the subject of youth there 
is another determination I have made and that is 
not to aggravate Old Age and make an enemy of 
him by finding fault with the rising generation. The 
rising generation is what the setting generation has 
made it. If there are youthful flappers it is because 
there have been aged floppers. Parents who flopped 
over the question of parental discipline and flopped 
again over needful lessons on reverence and simplic- 
ity and clean pleasures. And then, after getting the 


296 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


world involved in bloody murder called war, we old 
folks, to save our precious skins, send the young 
ones to the front to die for our blunders. On which 
account I find myself in favor, the next time we old 
ones have provoked a war, of passing a law to send 
every man between thirty and seventy-five to the 
front to be shot, and let the young folks who have 
had nothing to do with making the war, all under 
thirty, stay at home, and decorate the town for their 
fathers and older brothers and granddads when 
those who have not been killed come home to the 
bosom of their children and grandchildren. 

I make myself a solemn vow that I will not make 
my declining years sour and disagreeable by always 
harking back to the good old days when young peo- 
ple were reverent, considerate, polite, gentlemanly, 
ladylike, sensible, religious, and obedient. When- 
ever we old people talk like that we have forgotten 
the number of times our respected parents took us 
out into the woodshed or over their knees in an 
earnest attempt to pound some sort of decency into 
our own depraved youthful natures. 

In taking account of some of the special pleasures 
and privileges of Old Age that make him a friend, 
we surely can not pass by the delights of books. Of 
course, young folks read books, but most of them 
read them either for the pleasure of the story or 
because they have to study them. Old folks read 
books in a different fashion. There is, or there 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 297 


should be, a feeling of personal friendship between 
an old man and his books that younger folks know 
nothing about. As the years go by he has learned 
to distinguish between the books that are worth 
while, and the sort that are so depraved that they 
are called cellars. Capital letter C. There is a fine 
sifting out of titles and authors, and the reliable 
and the classic and the enduring sort of arrange 
themselves on his shelves in the proper order, and 
he loves them as if they were indeed alive, and as he 
takes them down for an evening or a stormy after- 
noon he pats them gently and affectionately, as a 
lover of a horse pats neck or side. Of course, no 
one needs to be told that any man who loves a horse 
at some time or other pats it. Whoever heard of 
a man patting an automobile? His inclination is 
oftener to take a club to it. In the same way no 
young person ever feels like patting a book caress- 
ingly. His only motive is to get through the story 
as soon as possible so as to get into another. 

But it is different with the man who has been 
reading books all his life. Within a select and 
limited range he ought to be able to cull out his two- 
foot shelf of worth-whiles, and be able to tell with- 
out the help of an expert book reviewer whether 
any of the books of today will be worth reading to- 
morrow. As for that matter, even if no more books 
were ever published, the old man (always of course, 
we are talking about a real lover of books) knows 


298 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


there are enough of the old friends with whom he is 
already on more than a speaking acquaintance. 

No book is worth reading once that is not worth 
reading twice. And most books that are worth read- 
ing at all ought to be worth reading once every year. 
I can think of hardly any more pleasing picture than 
the picture I saw once in the National Art Gallery 
in London of an old man sitting on a broad window- 
seat in a library with his back against a broad 
cushion reading a book with a red cover. Outside 
the window, in a blooming garden two lovers could 
be seen sitting by a fountain. But the look on their 
faces was not so ecstatic and withdrawn from all 
worldly affairs as the look which the artist had 
painted on the old man’s face as he read. That 
painter understood his business. I feel sure he had 
been in the garden and also in the window seat. 
And he was looking back on his own youth and giv- 
ing age the best of it. 

But after all else has been said the greatest factor 
in making Old Age a friend is friendship. I am 
inclined to believe that somewhere at this point more 
old people lose the joy of life than at any other. It 
is so easy to drop friends out of one’s life. There 
were two or three members of your college class 
(you remember?) with whom you corresponded for - 
a number of years, and then the demands of busi- 
ness and the entrance of new friends and the pursuit 
of trouble under the disguise of happiness caused 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 299 


you to discontinue the acquaintance, renewed fitfully 
as the years passed, and now and then you received 
a newspaper clipping that Brown had died, or Jones 
had gone to Congress, or Robinson had struck oil 
and could be found listed in Who’s Who. If a col- 
lege man, after the lapse of ten years, has one col- 
lege classmate with whom he keeps up a letter a 
year and from whom because his friendship will 
bear the strain when he goes to New York, he dares 
borrow fifty dollars to pay his fare home, it is at 
least the average continuance of college friendships. 

That might be passed over without too search- 
ing criticism of ourselves if we did not also fall into 
the mistake of neglecting the later friendships, made 
in middle life. For there is nothing quite so deso- 
late as the picture I sometimes have of some old 
people in my old parish who, when night comes, sit 
solitary behind the closed door waiting pitifully for 
a friendly push of the electric bell from the friends 
who seldom come, because they were not cultivated 
in the garden of yesterday. 

There is something deeply sorrowful in the’ way 
multitudes of otherwise good people fail to pro- 
vide for the delights of Old Age by laying up for 
themselves the riches of friendship. They have been 
too busy, they have not considered its value, _they 
have not thought they would ever need it, and when 
night comes they sit alone waiting for the footstep 
and the cheering voice that seldom come. 


300 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


The friendships of Old Age should be more satis- 
fying and peace-giving than the fervid emotional 
sentiments of younger minds and hearts. It is pos- 
sible of course in the hurly-burly of the average life 
of man in business or profession to win and hold 
friends that are satisfying and enduring. But after 
all, Old Age has the advantage of the years of test- 
ing, sifting and comparing. Out of the multitude of 
people the average man knows in the course of sixty 
or seventy years there will be culled out a small but 
delightful number, generally of those who have 
grown old together with him, of those who have 
found one another out to the extent that they are 
not afraid to bid them come in. And these are the 
choice few who, in the canny Scotch phrase, are bid 
to come “‘far ben.’’ Clear in to the fireside. 

There are no lonesome hearthstones for those 
who have been wise enough to look ahead to the 
time when riches, honors, office, fame, take on their 
proper value and friends are welcomed in to take the 
places once given to ambition and love of applause, 
and worldly success. The Master was a young man. 
But He spoke the rich experience of the Man of the 
ages when one day he said to His disciples, ‘‘No 
longer do I call you servants, but friends.” 

Something of that same peaceful sense of compen- © 
sation for earth’s losses and disappointments the old 
people of the world can feel, if as evening comes 
on, true and tried friends come ‘‘far ben’? and the 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 301 


dreadful lonesomeness of neglected and forgotten 
old age is not a part of the fact of advancing years. 

There has nothing been said so far as to what 
makes people old or what the boundary line is. 
Most certainly the line is not measured by the addi- 
tion of days into years. 

There does not appear to be any standard by 
which to decide the matter of old age. It is an in- 
dividual matter. Some men give you the impres- 
sion of old age by their slovenly dress or their slo- 
venly talk or their shuffling gait, or the absence of 
enthusiasm. | 

I wonder sometimes what test we might apply to 
discover when we pass over the line that separates 
youth from age. I have thought at times it might be 
when we met children and they never smiled at us 
because we never smiled at them, or perhaps it was 
some morning, when we forgot to say our prayers, 
or when we lost our ideals of virtue and spirituality. 
But whenever or wherever that line may be crossed 
it is to my mind not a line to be stepped over care- 
lessly as if it did not matter, and it will not be all 
the same 100 years from now. 

But the imperative fact of Old Age whenever it 
becomes a fact to us need not dismay us nor sadden 
us. For its compensations are many, as many, [ 
am inclined to believe, as the disappointments of 
youth. 

To speak of Death as an old friend is to contra- 


302 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


dict the ordinary and universal thought of that 
event. Death in human experience has always been 
described as an enemy, as dreadful, awful, fear- 
ful, and something to be shunned at almost any cost. 
And yet it is altogether possible that Death may 
be another friend like Old Age. I am not trying 
to argue about it or preach a stereotyped homily 
on it, but simply to jot down a few thoughts that 
have been accumulating in my mind, and whether 
they are worth anything or not they will harm no 
one, and I may get some measure of mental satis- 
faction in trying to express them. 

There have been only two definitions of Death 
that are worth considering. One is that Death is 
the end of an old experience. The other is that it is 
the beginning of a new experience. I need not pause 
to state my own definition, without argument, to be 
the latter. And if that is a fact then it is the su- 
preme adventure of humanity, but an adventure to 
be faced with serenity, because it will be free from 
pain and accident and loss. 

The universal fear of Death may be due to the 
dread of the unknown, quite as much as to the love 
of life. But suppose we do know something posi- 
tive about it. That knowledge ought to go a long 
ways toward dispelling the fear. If we say, there- 
fore, that Death is the beginning of a new experi- 
ence, free from pain, disease, poverty, ugliness fail- 
ure, hate, ill-will and disappointment, then we are 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 303 


not exaggerating when we call Death an Old Friend. 
And it is on the assumption that the existence into 
which the event of Death ushers me is all that is 
defined in a new experience that everything now to 
be said about Death is based. If there is no new 
experience revealed by Death there is nothing more 
to be said. If there is a positive new experience 
revealed by Death, language fails to describe its 
tremendous reach of wonder, beauty, and of happi- 
ness. 

One reason for the universal fear of death lies 
in the common avoidance of the subject. We do 
not talk about Death except with solemn vocabulary 
and with apologies for lugging it in. We might 
accustom ourselves to its inevitable place in our 
lives if we did not avoid getting acquainted with his 
character. We have invested Death with the trap- 
pings of woe, with skull and cross-bones and we put 
a white mask on him and reduce his dignity to a 
scarecrow figure prowling around in the dark to grab 
us with his bony fingers. 

One of the most fearful conceptions of death that 
has been accepted by art is to be found in West- 
minster Abbey in the tomb of the young girl who 
died in her youth. Ravaillac, the sculptor, has carved 
a grinning skeleton, his skull and one bony arm em- 
erging from a tomb and in the skeleton fingers he 
aims a dart at the figure of the maiden, who is 
fainting with fear in the arms of her mother above. 


304 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS LIFE STORY 


If any one says that the facts of death bear out the 
ghastly picture of him then all any one can say is that 
such a picture does not take account of anything 
except the one brief physical moment of the change 
from an old to a new experience, and does not look 
one inch beyond the momentary change from the 
physical to the spiritual. 

Most of us, I take it, have had more or less cur- 
losity concerning what will actually happen to us 
when we die. That curiosity has led to the forma- 
tion of societies of Psychical Research, to Spiritual- 
ism and Theosophy and even scientific attempts, so- 
called, to communicate with the other world. But 
even granting everything that the most enthusiastic 
believers in such attempts have claimed the entire 
body of real results summed up does not shed one 
ray of useful knowledge on the other world. 

The London Society for Psychical Research has 
published 20 big volumes since 1882, and the most 
that the leaders in the Society will admit is the exist- 
ence of telepathy and the belief that apparitions are 
not due to chance alone. All that is such a pitiful 
lack of knowledge that it is not worth even this 
brief and passing mention. 

And I mention it only to call attention to the fact 
that in trying to picture the details of a new ex- 
perience which death will usher us into, we are 
obliged to base them all on the general fact of an 
existence of personal consciousness in surroundings 





FORTY YEAR MAN. CLASS OF 1886. 
DEGREE D.D. BY BROWN UNIVERSITY, 1924. 





TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 305 


that are ideal, but capable of expression’ only in 
terms such as we have known in the life we have 
lived in the body. 

I think it is fairly within the province of the 
imagination to picture some of the things that will 
be possible in the other world; not because they 
have been described by a medium, but because they 
may be within the scope of our own natures. If 
anything now said may seem to be unreal or even 
absurd it will not be due, I hope, to the impossibility 
of them but to the impossibility of describing what 
one feels, in the language we are obliged to use. 

Taking for granted that Death itself is no more 
than a momentary signal to mankind that the new 
experience has begun I have what is almost like a 
sense of positive knowledge that the first thing I 
will experience will be a delightful freedom from 
the exactions of time. ‘There will be no minutes, 
hours, days, months and years in this new experience. 
There will be simply a feeling of supreme existence, 
living at the height of growing power. Not a com- 
pletion of anything but a growing appreciation of 
what it is all about. 

If I push my imagination a step farther I find 
that what seems the next most natural and easy 
thing to picture is the real and vivid meeting with 
those I have loved and liked in this life. I haven’t 
the slightest picture in my mind as to how that will 
take place in the details, but there does not seem to 


806 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS |jLIFE STORY 


be the slightest hesitation in my mind that the meet- 
ing itself will be at the very beginning of my new 
experience and that it will be absolutely satisfying to 
every part of my being. 

We are, of-course, all of us so born into condi- 
tions of time and boundary that it is impossible for 
us to think of any existence which does not carry 
with it a sense of place. And if the readers of this 
paper will let their minds expel old and fixed com- 
mentaries on religious expressions, and entertain the 
words of Jesus as an attempt to convey a tremendous 
fact about the future to humanity that hungered 
for it, what He said once about preparing a “‘place”’ 
for those who had ended the earthly life has a very 
stupendous meaning. For the dread of being “ 
prisoned in the viewless winds, and blown with rest- 
less violence round about the pendent world” is not 
a thought that makes death a friend. Rather it 
invests him with grisly terror. But to be quite cer- 
tain that we shall continue to have an abiding place, 
and that place undisfigured by any ugliness or fail- 
ure of perfection is to make death take on another 
aspect quite different from the accepted ah univer- 
sal thought of him. 

For years I have wondered within myself, sel- 
dom venturing to talk about it to any one else, what - 
I would have to do in the other world. If I elimin- 
ate eating, sleeping, reading, writing, making money 
and losing it, going to church, moving pictures, lec- 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 307 


tures, conventions, and political gatherings, and a 
hundred other things that engage my daily energy 
here in the body, what will there be for me to do to 
take up the time called eternity? 

It sounds ridiculous, but if the thing is going to 
be a reality, it is not ridiculous; it is tremendously 
tragic if we have no answer to give to our own 

wonder. I believe a satisfactory answer can be 
- given to a part of the question as to the way a part 
of eternity can and will be spent, and that is in 
meeting the personalities that have been a part of 
the earthly history. For it does not seem at all 
grotesque or impossible that Death will usher us 
into the most interesting and delightful companion- 
ship with the world’s worthy souls, all those who 
have so lived that such companionship will be con- 
genial and necessary. 

I find myself dwelling at times with a degree of 
excited anticipation on the wonderful meetings I 
shall have with Lincoln, and Gladstone, and Flor- 
ence Nightingale, and Phillips Brooks, and Henry 
Ward Beecher, and John Wesley, and John Knox, 
and Browning, and Tennyson, and Whittier, and 
Socrates, and Thomas A Kempis, and Augustine, 
and Moses, and Peter, and John, and Paul, and the 
countless number of saints who suffered martyrdom 
for their faith, and the host of those who are worth 
knowing because they have lived worthily. 

I am taking for granted that there is no aristoc- 


308 CHARLES M. SHELDON: HIS UIFE STORY 


racy in the other world which will prevent the 
humblest soul from the highest friendship with the 
high and mighty of earth. With our small and 
bounded conceptions of time we are unable to con- 
ceive the possibility of ever wearing out this method 
of spending eternity. J once was somewhat worried 
over the problem as to how eternity was going to be 
taken care of, but my mind finds a real satisfaction 
in the companionships of the spirit. In this world 
we do not have time enough to know our few 
friends as we would like. In the other world with 
no time to count, and with a companionship num- 
bered by countless millions, eternity will not be a 
bit too long in which to enjoy it. 

I suppose there will also be some service of some 
sort to render. ‘There is a phrase in the good old 
Book which says, ‘And his servants shall do him 
service.” It does not say what, and we wish it had. 
But if there is service to be given that is another 
reason why Death may be an old friend. 

If Old Age finds any of us broken down in body 
and mind, ambition departed, desire a thing of the 
past, the home desolated, a new generation present 
that is restless because we still linger, then certainly 
we can not define Death as anything less than a 
friend to be welcomed. And to multitudes of old - 
folks this is a fact. But if Old Age shall be a 
mellow and gracious ripening rather than a rotting, 
even then Death shall not be a terror, but an an- 


TWO OLD FRIENDS: OLD AGE AND DEATH 4809 


ticipation of a new experience that shall be free 
from the disappointments and distresses of the 
earthly existence and the promise of an astonishing 
future. 

In the last paragraph of Dr. Lyman Abbott’s 
‘‘Reminiscences,”’ there is an expression so fitting for 
the conclusion of what I have said so awkwardly 
that I would like to quote it as expressing the same 
feeling on the part of all of us, I trust, who in the 
evening of life are expecting morning to follow 
night. It comes with peculiar appropriateness pre- 
ceding as it does, only a short time before he put 
forth to sea: 


D’Envoi 


“T look forward to the Great Adventure which 
now can not be far off with awe but not with appre- 
hension. I enjoy my work, my home, my friends, 
my life. I shall be sorry to part with them. But 
always I have stood in the bow looking forward 
with hopeful anticipation to the life before me. 
When the time comes for my embarkation and the 
ropes are cast off and I put out to sea, I think I 
shall still be standing in the bow and still looking 
forward with eager curiosity and glad hopefulness 
to the new world to which the unknown voyage will 
bring me.” 













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